The Early Days

I first started programming in Scratch many years ago, where I made a few simple games and animations. At some point I moved on to Python, where I learned to write more complex programs. Wanting to visualise the things I made, I learned Processing and spent a huge amount of time writing games, simulations, animations and more.

Machine Learning?

At some point in my programming journey, I found a video by Code Bullet where he made a very simple genetic algorithm to teach dots how to find a target. After watching the video repeatedly, I attempted to recreate the algorithms myself.

After a couple failed attempts, I finally managed to create my very first machine learning program. That was the moment I fell in love with machine learning. I spent countless hours learning about supervised and unsupervised learning methods, writing my own neural network libraries and creating more advanced and powerful programs.

My favourite project was a simple self-driving car that I developed. A car would cast rays out in multiple directions, receiving information about the distance to the nearest wall. This information was passed into a neural network which determined whether the car would accelerate, decelerate, turn left or turn right.

After a considerable amount of time waiting for the inefficient program to train, I was left with a car that could drift around corners and complete the track perfectly.

Speed and Power

Soon, I realised that the programs I was writing were too inefficient to be practical for larger projects, so I started to learn C, which proved to be a bit more difficult than I had anticipated. After a day or two of failing to fix countless bugs, I gave up and moved on to C++, which I found significantly easier to learn.

Although I did eventually go back and learn C, C++ has become my favourite language to work in and I have developed a very good understanding of it. I've developed a range of libraries and programs in C++; most notably, LibRapid , which is an incredibly fast, open-source linear algebra library I have been working on for a while now.