I have been building things since I was a kid. It only got more complicated.

It started with LEGO. My dad bought me a set, I got hooked, and he kept buying more. He started getting me sets rated for older kids, which were harder, and that turned out to be the part I liked. Building something difficult and getting it exactly right. I still have some of them built and looked after today. A few did not survive the years.

Then it turned into robots. I programmed one to cross our living room, get around the tables and the chairs, and come back to where it started without hitting anything. It took a lot of attempts. I enjoyed every one of them.

School picked me for a robotics competition. I worked on building the robot, and we trained at another school because ours had no proper field to test on. For the competition I was selected as the driver. It was a big competition and we finished among the top teams, with two of the special medals they hand out for individual categories. I went back and did it more than once.

The code came in middle school. I typed a line of text into a file and it appeared on a web page in my own browser, because I had put it there. Then it clicked that every site I had ever looked at was doing the same thing underneath. Real coding started for me at SQL and databases, but you have to start somewhere.

By the time I reached university I had been at this for years, so the early modules were familiar ground. I graduated from the University of Salford with first honours in software engineering. During the degree I interned at Beyon Money and built a fraud reporting system for them. Their team still uses it every day, which is on the work page.

Now I build apps. The first thing I put online was this portfolio. Then I wanted a notes app that stayed on top of my screen and let me see through it, so I wrote one. I kept using it and kept fixing whatever annoyed me that day. That became Qirtas.

Undig is the serious one and it launches soon. It finds a file from a description of what is inside it. It has already earned its place at home: my dad and my brother hand me their hard drives and USB sticks to find files they had given up on. A few minutes to index, under a second to find. Watching that work is most of the reason I keep going on it.

I like taking apart new models and tools to see what they actually do, rather than what the demo says they do. I trained a small model to read handwritten digits as a side project once, which was a fun thing to build. Things are moving quickly and I would rather stay familiar with what is new than catch up later. Either way I will keep building.