10/09/24 - Site Under Construction!

Hello!

You've found the landing page for all things OneLoneCoder (or "OLC" for short). What started as a fun way to for one man to document his projects, became an established, talented and friendly community of programmers who like to code things for fun. From absolute beginners to established industry grey-beards, we've all found each other through our shared love of programming, technology and being a bit silly.

Well that would be me! You've probably seen my face splattered on some YouTube videos if youve been looking for resources to learn about programming. I've been programming for around 30 years, as a hobby, as an academic and currently as an industrial engineer. I began my programming journey with a BBC Model B+ in the 1980's, and worked my way through various BASICs, Pascals, C/C++'s and some odd ball things like Java, C# and VHDL!

I've always been fascinated by how computer games work, often more so than the game itself. As such, as I've learned new programming concepts I've always tried to use them in games. Well, more like demos. Well, more like fragments of game demos. Ok, so finishing things wasnt exactly my priority. This made learning programming fun! Once I became adept at it, I realised many of those techniques were applicable to complex simulations and industrial applications.

My academic background is in the quirky field of Neuromorphic Engineering, where I completed my PhD studying large scale simulation architectures for biologically inspired networks (yeeeeears before stable diffusion, just saying...). This led to needing to understand electronics so I could design novel simulation hardware architectures exploiting both digital and analogue processing.

During my time at university as a Post-Doc, and working closely with many students (great fun btw) I observed something that made be a bit sad: the programming capabilities of the students were diminishing year-on-year. I was puzzled at first. Surely with the widespread availabilty of programming resources, cheap computers and accessible tools, we should be seeing more and more skilled programmers? Well, those resources? Mostly rubbish. Those accessible tools? Vertically steep learning curves. Cheap computers? Multiply layered abstractions of what's actually happening on the hardware. In short, the option to just mess about with code and see what happens had gone.

Having designed processors, simulated brains, designed cameras, produced intelligent surveilance gear and created a programming language, I left university because I needed some money, and got a real job instead :P. Actually, I was a bit burnt-out from programming all the time, and needed to do something different.

Ten years later and now I design and build robots and equipment for various industries including power generation, nuclear, aerospace and freight. Honestly, it's a far cry from what I actually trained to do, but it's really good fun, and every job is different. The best part? I rarely need to program anything! This meant I could at last enjoy programming recreationally again, and I can program whatever I want, when I want. Bliss!

With this new found coding freedom, I started my OLC initiative. The idea was simple. Create some programming resources that aren't patronising, are clearly presented, don't make assumptions about your abilities, never tell you what you should and shouldn't do, have some humour and present complex topics in a tangiable way (What's more fun? Learning the Fibonacci sequnce or procedurally generating a universe? Printing "Hello World!" or displaying a first person shooter game?). Who knew? It caught on and over 300K subscribers and 20M views later, here we are.

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