35063e

Software Engineer and Tech Enthusiast with 15+ years experience, returning from somewhat a break in Technology, using this as a platform for Projects and Experiments.

I’ve been interested in technology for as long as I can remember. It started in my early teens, learning to code so I could make game mods, then progressed into modifying hardware, taking things apart and generally trying to work out how everything worked.

At 16, I left my computer science studies to become an apprentice software engineer at a leading UK biometric security company. Its technology was used everywhere from government facilities and banks to football stadiums, royal households and installations around the world.

Over the next eight years, I worked my way up from apprentice to senior engineer and eventually team leader. The job itself was difficult to define, which was probably the best thing about it. One day I might be programming or designing PCBs, the next repairing hardware, handling support calls, helping manage projects or getting sent somewhere at short notice. It was chaotic, varied and an incredibly good way to learn.

After eight years, though, I’d burned out. I stepped away from technology for a while and eventually moved into a less technical role in PropTech. For the next five years, the idea of spending my evenings building things on a computer held very little appeal.

Recently, that curiosity has started creeping back. Quite a lot changed while I wasn’t paying attention. AI became genuinely useful, CPUs and GPUs became ridiculous, and the way software can be built changed dramatically. For probably the first time in my life, I feel slightly behind technology.

So, 35063e is my playground for catching up. It’s a home for projects, experiments, questionable ideas and things I’ll build purely because I wondered whether I could. And, far less dramatically, #35063e is simply a shade of purple I like.

I’m also an avid gamer, so some of my projects started life as tools for online communities. Usually because something didn’t exist, something annoyed me, or I looked at it and thought it could probably be done better.

Outside technology, I like dead things. That probably needs some clarification. I collect taxidermy, human osteological specimens, antiques and other slightly macabre curiosities. I’ve always been fascinated by anatomy, pathology and the funeral industry, and in another life I might have followed that path instead.

But I didn’t. I build things on computers and occasionally buy skeletons.

Life takes strange turns.