Runes, Robots, and Code

Do you believe in predetermined paths?

From the moment we take our first breath, are our lives already laid out for us? Well, if you know the answer, you’d have to tell me because I’m clueless and eager to find out.

RuneScape Realizations

Our story begins in my early childhood in Reading, Berkshire, where I stumbled upon a game that would have a massive influence on my life. It shaped the way I think about the world and what I do today.

Enter RuneScape. If you’ve heard of it or played it, you probably know what I’m talking about. RuneScape is an MMORPG that’s been around forever. In my early teens, my brother and I were practically glued to our screens, living in the world of Gielinor. My understanding of geography? All thanks to the game’s mini-map. That tiny circle with cardinal points taught me how to navigate maps. I still picture my surroundings this way, from a birds eye view.

As a kid, all I wanted to do was play RuneScape, start a YouTube channel, and build a website. Lofty goals for a ten-year-old, right? Oddly enough, I accomplished all of them. I even created my own offline RuneScape Private Server (RSPS) 😅. My memory is foggy on how exactly I did that, but hey, the internet always had the answers.

Interestingly, I was introduced to Scratch programming in my ICT class at school, but it didn’t quite catch my fancy. I built a few games and quickly forgot about it.

Robots Rule

Boarding school. Need I say more? This phase introduced me to Robotics—Lego Mindstorms, to be exact. It felt almost natural. I loved assembling those Lego pieces, but the real magic was in the programmable NXT head. Attach a part here, add a few instructions there, and voila! Your own robotic creation. Want it to follow a line? Use a light sensor. Sort colors? Bring in the color sensor! Want it to play golf? Give it a swinging arm!

I had a blast with those NXT and later EV3 robots. They sparked my desire to learn how to code.

Code Chaos

By the time I reached university, I had taught myself HTML and CSS, only to be greeted by C++ in my first year. Ah, the joys of higher education! There were numerous projects and crazy experiments, from installing custom ROMs on my phone to building Android spyware and Windows viruses. Yes, I did these for fun—I wanted to understand how things worked.

One project that often comes to mind is HearAI. Let’s rewind to 2018/2019. AI and ML were the buzzwords of the era.
In my third year, I had what I thought was a brilliant idea: an app to help people who couldn’t see or read the language. Point it at some text, and it would use OCR to extract and read it out loud. I built the app in Flutter, using Firebase’s ML Kit. Little did I know, Google was working on something quite similar with Google Lens!

The Journey Continues

And that brings us to today, where I’m still exploring the wacky world of software engineering. From RuneScape to robots, and from custom ROMs to AI projects, it’s been one heck of a ride.

Who knows what comes next? Stick around, and let’s find out together!