Under Construction

This portfolio repo is not optimally designed, and I'm working on a v2.0 that will be easier to maintain and add new projects

A Bit About Me

After a successful career in International Private Medical Insurance (IPMI) based in Asia (China, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong), I decided to go back to university in order to pursue a new career doing something I was actually excited about. I returned to Ireland and obtained a postgraduate Diploma in computer science with first-class honours from Griffith College Dublin.

After spending most of Covid self-studying Swift and SwiftUI, I was accepted into the Apple Developer Academy in Napoli. The first year uses the CBL (Challenge-Based Learning) system to task students to create many iOS apps over the course of the year. The course covers ideation & evaluation, design, development (coding), and business & marketing. Over the course of the year I specialised in the developer path, but still participated in the other aspects.

After completing the first year I was accepted into the Pier Program, where a small number of outstanding students are given an opportunity to further develop their skills by being assigned to a single project and working in an Agile environment. In my own case, the project was a macOS app that enables Academy alumni to communicate and share stories. Our team took the project from ideation to MVP over the course of the year, and the app has now “graduated” from the Pier Program and has been taken over by the Academy Alumni board as a community project.

I speak Mandarin well, and I'm fairly competent in Japanese.

What's the point of this repository?

This repository is kind of a practice portfolio where I will be posting example code and the end result of various tutorials that I've been following.

The hope is that I can share this link and it will demonstrate my understanding of programming and will hopefully lead to employment.

What languages/technologies am I familiar with?

In my computer science course I was introduced to:

Java and JavaFX
HTML5 / CSS 3 / PHP (w/ Bootstrap)
MySQL

Since graduating I have been studying:

Swift
SwiftUI
RealityKit (AR)
SpriteKit
Vapor (Server-side Swift)
Python (for some job interviews)

In the Apple Developer Academy I would study new frameworks as they were required, including (but not limited to):

SwiftData
CloudKit
Swift Packages
MapKit
GameKit
Filemaker

What do I love working on?

After starting to study Swift and SwiftUI, I knew that I would try to become an iOS/macOS developer.

I found that I quite enjoy designing the UI for apps, and find SwiftUI to be very simple, yet powerful.

I'm aware that a lot of large projects still use UIKit, but I have not spent much time on studying this. I'd prefer to "skate to where the puck it going", and make sure I'm in a stong position for newer projects.

While I currently do not have much experience with AppKit/UIKit/Obj-C, I'm sure that I'd be able to learn them fairly quickly should it be required.

What tutorials have I been following?

I started with Paul Hudson's Hacking With Swift course, which is an excellent free online course, and I recommend to everyone who is interested in coding.

Meng To does fantastic design tutorials at DesignCode

Kavsoft also have some great tutorials on Youtube.

I've recently discovered CodeSlicing who have excellent animation tutorials.

Reality School have some good AR and VR tutorials.

While researching solutions to various problems I encountered, I also came across Azam Sharp's YouTube Channel, which I found quite useful.

I also followed some of the free tutorials on Ray Wenderlich's site.

I've also learned from random places on the internet or YouTube, and I will try to give proper attribution. If I miss any, please let me know and I'll update accordingly.