For my Undergraduate Dissertation, I built a C++ based FORTRAN II Compiler for writing and compiling programs to run on the original EDSAC Machine at Bletchley park. This project was completed under the supervision of Professor Andrew Brown, with the goal of dramatically simplifying the process of writing and compiling programs to the tape-based instruction set of the EDSAC machine.

The compiler was built entirely from first principles, constructing symbol tables, memory mappings, instructions and optimizations, etc, entirely from scratch. This project also included the elicitation and understanding of a 70 year old instruction set, many elements of which are now entirely archaic and previously undocumented.

The project was highly successful, resulting in a first-class classification. The following feedback was provided by my project’s supervisor:

In a career spanning 40 years, I have looked at (both here and as an external) probably north of 200 undergraduate projects, and this has to be up there in the top 3. It was a massively ambitious project, that I never realistically expected him to chase through to the end. He was enthusiastic and competent the whole way through. I'd like to see him get a prize for this, and I am completely comfortable with a first class degree mark. - Professor Andrew Brown.

You can find the source code for the project (all 20,000 lines of it) on my github.

My homelab is an environment which allows me to build, develop, learn and experiment with new tools, software and hardware in a safe and controller environment.

I’ve been invlolved with homelabbing for two years now, and in that time have learnt a wealth about networking, virtualization, containerization, Linux (both as a user, and sysadmin), among a host of other things. My homelab currently consists of:

• FreeIPA for LDAP/Radius authentication.
• Bind as a primary nameserver.
• Cobbler as a secondary nameserver, as well as DHCP/PXE server.
• Proxmox, as a primary virtualization host.
• Grafana/Telegraf/InfluxDB - I’ve been using this stack reliably for years, and plan to foray in ELK in the future.
• Pfsense / Cisco IOS - I run a set of cisco catalyst/small business switches, as well as a virtualized pfsense host, and a modded watchguard XTM 525 as a failover.
• Puppet - I’d consider myself still a newcomer to Puppet, but I’m quickly (and excitedly) exploring it’s powers.
• NGINX - I use NGINX as a reverse proxy, to proxy specific access to services from outside my home network.
• Other smaller services: MariaDB, Gitlab, OpenWiki, Nextcloud, etc.

I generally use CentOS 7/8 or docker for the majority of my services.

My homelab is in a constant state of adaptation, with new technologies, services and tools being deployed all the time. It’s been an invaluable source of learning, particularlly for aspects of networking, system administration, virtualization, docker and Linux.

I’m an avid linux/vim/terminal lover. If you’re interested in my dotfiles, you can find them here.

Day to day, I rely on Arch/i3, and vim/tmux. I tend to prefer to read code / navigate new projects (where fzf isn’t so effective) in vscode, and write code in vim. I’m a fan of FOSS, and small, portable and simple tools that I can rely on day to day.

I use GNU Stow to manage my dots.

My dotfiles are on Github - click here.