👋 Hey! I'm James -
A 19 year old computer science student. I love to code, specifically Websites, Web Dashboards, and backend APIs, or any software really! I also enjoy server management on Linux with Docker, etc. This is my personal, portfolio, mess-around website! It's not fully completed yet but I update it when I get the time. Scroll down to read more :)
About Me
I have had an interest in programming and computer systems since I was young. I start off by going to a CoderDojo where I learned my first steps of Scratch, HTML, CSS & JS and Python. Although the majority of my knowledge has been self thought, by building random projects, reading documentation and watching guides. I hope to persue this interest as a career later on in life.
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During the covid pandemic, I really started to learn Python. I started by making Discord chatbots. BeatleBot was my first major coding project, still running today (shown below in Featured Products). That led on to developing Lively (discontinued), StatsChannels and multiple other Discord integrations. Discord bots were a fundamental part of my programming journey as it thought be a lot of the important do's and don'ts as well as useful skills, Git and MySQL.
Another thing I started during this time was server hosting and self hosting services for personal use. I started with a small Raspberry Pi 3A+ (it has 512MB of ram, I know). This is where I ran all of my projects. It wasn't very happy and would crash frequently. Now I have a Raspberry Pi 4 and a VPS from Hetzner, and among all three of these servers I run my own infrastructure of services and projects. These run on Ubuntu & Raspberrian via Docker, PM2 and others. (More in the Self Hosting section).
Current Projects View all
Projects I am currently working on, or new ideas that I want to build on when I have the time.
Checkly
A software application to assist with facilities management in a care home. Mainly focused on providing easy to use checklists with easy abilities to generate reports and analyse completion of tasks from staff.
JavaScript
Smart Screen
My first hardware and software project. I plan to make a small display similar to existing Alexa screens, to display useful information.
JavaScript/Go
El Comms
A service and webservice to monitor and manage my servers and general technology I use. It is a very loose idea at present.
??
Ellie Additions
A Minecraft java plugin that I am developing for servers I play on with my friends. It has a lot of features I find useful and have made to my liking instead of relying on other plugins.
Java
Featured Projects View all
Projects I am proud of and feel they need a special mention. Some of these are old and finished and others are still in the works!
Skills
Core:
Frontend:
Backend & Database:
Achievements
Winner of Coolest Projects International 2018 in Web Design
Completed Digital School Champions Program - May 2021
Participated in SciFest 2022 at Dublin City University
Hobbies & Interests
Programming full-stack
Computer Games
Music
Crochet
Self Hosting & Server Mangement
As discussed earlier, I run my own infrastructure of services among 3 servers (2 Raspberry Pi's and a Cloud VPS). This is where I also run all of my projects. This has been an important skill to master, as I am prepped in maintaining running servers, site-reliability and server security.
I also self-host some services for my own use, for reasons of more security (I manage my data), more features (generally without a fee), and just for the fun!
Some things I run on the network are:
- DBs (Postgres, MariaDB, Mongo) - what my services and projects use to store data.
- Other Microservices - e.g. my API which handles and controls backend tasks and schedules backups, and my DDNS & Starter service which ensures site-reliability for my services if there is a power failure or network failure.