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At 16 years old I knew that I was good at French and Spanish, I liked drawing, being creative and that I was also good on a computer.
With the GCSE's I had gained from school, I went on to a 6th form college. My GCSE results allowed me to skip Foundation GNVQ I.T. and go straight onto Intermediate GNVQ I.T. along with key skills in Mathematics. I also had a part time job in the evening loading arctic lorries at Parceline. This allowed me to buy my first high spec computer that I educated myself on the hardware components of a computer.
After passing the Intermediate GNVQ I.T. I was able to go onto the Advanced GNVQ I.T . I completed the first year and gained a second job throughout the summer at Instock (Nottingham). I then went back to college for my second year in September 2000 and passed the Advanced GNVQ I.T. in summer 2001.
After successfully completing college, I was immediately offered a job at Klassix screen printing until I could find a job in I.T. It may not have been a job that I desired but it tought me a lot about attention to detail and tight time scales.v
In my spare time I would spend hours designing websites with software such as Macromedia flash, Dreamweaver and photoshop. I did animated websites for beauty models starting off their career and tattoo artists to show their work.
With the design portfolio I had created after college, I was offered a digitising job at David Sharp Ltd. Here I did designs for companies such as Burberry, Cotton traders, Savile row and even small embroidery companies.
I setup Evister embroidery design after my employer David Sharp Ltd went into liquidation. I created a logo, worksheets and a website all within a tight time scale.
With mobile phones becoming more popular than computers, I started to learn more into html as flash did not work on smart devices. I upgraded my Evister website by giving it a mobile device option. I also started learning alternative software such as Corel Draw and Illustrator to get better artwork results.
EMU was setup in my living room alongside Evister. Word quickly spread about my work and I never had to advertise to get work. East Midlands Uniforms would offer products from company logos, workwear, vectors, websites, leaflets, posters and all promotion items for customers. I was using software photoshop/ Corel draw/ Dreamweaver/illustrator/ Wilcom. For websites I would use opencart/wordpress/ HTML5/CSS all based on my server.
My daughter was diagnosed with type one diabetes in 2011, she used an insulin pump to give insulin alongside a constant glucose monitor. With the technology she had for her day-to-day life I was able to get this data to broadcast to a website using GitHub and Microsoft Azure. This allows my wife and I or anyone else with the API secret to view our daughter’s glucose levels over the internet. With this we were able to see live glucose levels and patterns throughout the week allowing us to manually make changes to her hourly rate of insulin to stop high or low glucose levels.
I have always kept up to date with software programs I use and in my spare time I would do projects in with Xcode/ Adobe XD/ android studio. I was also doing a lot of UDEMY/Sololearn/Freecodecamp exercises in AWS/HTML/CSS/JavaScript/Phython.
Before the pandemic hit in 2020,I was learning more about building apps within Android studio. I was following a few developers that had created an app to enhance the life of a type one diabetic. It allowed certain android phones to connect to an insulin pump. I followed the progress of the project carefully for a few months as I did not want to put my daughter’s life in any danger. I saw its advantages that it was bringing to other type one diabetics around the world and saw how they would improve my daughter’s life. With the instructions at hand, I created the app with android studio and GitHub, unlocked the mobile phone and placed a custom LineageOS on it. After a few weeks of completing the objectives we were confident in using it on my daughter.
Nottingham
National
Fundraiser
Mr.Austin 2021
