I have spent the past 9 years working as a doctor, the last 4 years of which was in psychiatry. Throughout my life I have always been drawn to coding. Long before I went to medical school, I was making games in GameMaker and later I taught myself how to use Unity whilst I was at university. Now that I have decided to have a change in career, I am wanting to pursue the one interest that has consistently kept me engaged and wanting to learn more.

I have recently completed a 17 week coding course at Dev Academy where I worked on full stack projects (either individually, utilising pair programming or in Agile groups) capable of CRUD operations using RESTful APIs. During the course I learned how to use HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, Tailwind, Node, Express, Knex, SQLite3, Vitest and Superagent.

I am now putting these new skills to the test and will continue to improve upon the projects below.

(Pronounced Glyph) was a week long group project for the final week of Devacademy Aotearoa.

I had wanted to work on some form of social media for our final project and was also interested in explroing image uploading.

One of my coursemates had suggested an interesting angle for an image based social media project which was that the website should contain no words, only symbols and emojis.

I liked the challenge this presented of creating a UI which was intuitive enough that words would not be needed to navigate.

I worked on the image upload page and post creation front and back end including creating a Cloudinary account and using Multer middleware to send image files to the platform.

Other features I worked on included the loading component, the emoji picker and some profile features such as editing the profile and adding a profile picture.

During the final showcase I presented to a group of non-coders, talking them though our tech-stack from front end to back end.

This project originally began long before Dev Academy as a macro enabled Excel spreadsheet.

I host an annual costume party for the Eurovision Song Contest and we discovered that some of our friends would struggle with the costume research process, particularly if there were not very familiar with Eurovision.

I therefore saw the need to create a costume database which would store information about past Eurovision entries with screenshots so that people could easily find inspiration for their costume.

With the skills that I learned at Dev Academy I began working on turning the database in to an interactive website as my personal project.

Festivals such as the Edinburgh Fringe or the Art Deco Festival often provide a detailed programme, however it can often be difficult to know if the event you are looking at might clash with others you might want to attend.

The event planner aims to simplify this by taking events in its database and arranging them in a planner side by side so you can immediatley see what's on each day and which events are on at the same time.

It is capable of all CRUD operations using RESTful APIs so events can easily be read, added, edited and deleted.

This Unity project aimed to create a programme which would generate realistic maps for role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons.

Specifically, I wanted a map generator which would simulate continental drift, climate biomes, city trade routes and handle city name generation.

I was approached by artist Tiras Verey to collaborate on a platformer using his original artwork called HOME.

I was interested in working with Unity lighting and layered backgrounds to create an atmosphere which would suit the artwork.

I focused on incorporating unique attack and movement mechanics in to the gameplay and recommended we also add tools for speed running and challenge runs early on in development as this can attract gamers and creators to less well known games.

You can see more of Tiras Verey's artwork at his website www.tirasvereyarts.com or on instagram @tiras_verey_arts.