I am a classically & conventionally trained scientist with BSc. and MSc. degrees in Biochemistry and Chemistry. I was at one time a medical researcher but sadly decided there was no future in pure science. I bagan my I.T. career as a Cisco qualified network support and design engineer (at BT and other Telcos and ISP's), QA Automation, DevOps automation and now finally, a fully committed Software Engineer (Primarily Python).
- Being somewhat of an inventor, I love finding new and innovative ways to use the Raspberry Pi and other SBC's. I marvel at the way sensors and actuators bring another dimension to my Python creations.
- As a keen member of the maker community I utilize many flavours of SBC's and microcontrollers in my IoT projects including Arduino, PyBoard, ESP8266, ESP32 etc. with languages like MicroPython, CircuitPython and C.
- I enjoy electronics; designing PCB's, soldering, fixing, reverse engineering etc. Recently saved myself a fortune by repairing two 'dead' Synology NAS drives. The component failures were identified by 'hacking' the firmware. These drives would have been destined for the scrap pile.
- Sadly, life if short. So automation is the key. I try to automate as much as possible (at work and home). For example, a recent endeavour to source a Sony PS5 was proving fruitless. However, with the aid of web scraping (utilising Selenium, OpenCV, Beautiful Soup and Scrapy) I was able to snag one within days. I know this is an abuse of my Python powers...I'm keeping this one in my private repository for obvious reasons.
- When I'm not coding, inventing, soldering and welding I can usually be found golfing. It's surprising how cathartic whacking a little ball with a stick can be.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! (or laugh 😆 or cry 😭...)