My Projects

Compassionately Speaking - Early Middle of 2026

This project started when I wanted to help my mum move her website onto my own server to cut down on hosting costs. Since the original site had been made with the website hoster's proprietary website builder, it meant the code was locked away and designed to not be moved. Because of this it was not just difficult to download, but it was messy and none of it was reusable for me.

Since none of the original website was salvagable I decided to just recreate it from scratch, it was at this point I was looking more into the better ways of building the website so it's still easy for me to work with. After a while, I realised that what would work best for me while keeping the fastest load times and best SEO was to create a program that created the HTML files, which I did through JavaScript.

I ended up creating a node.js project that generated all of the HTML files to the website directory. This way I was able to reuse parts through functions to avoid having to copy and paste sections, as well as being able to change something like an email address from just one location. What lead me to this decision was the header and footer, while I could use scripting on the actual website to handle it, it would only be worse off for the user as no matter how it is implemented. It's just going to be more processing for the client.

Campaign Website - Early 2025

This was my first website that I created for the general public, and it's where I gained the most experience. I had dabbled in websites beforehand but they were only to show to a couple of people, they were just for a bit of fun and not something I had fully thought out. With this project, not only was it something serious, but something a lot of people saw, so I got a lot more feedback on it.

This is when I looked the most into the design aspect, colour theory, how the shapes affect the overall perception, etc. There was a lot of things that most people probably don't actively notice but it makes a significant difference. I had to learn how to keep my colour scheme whilst keeping the contrast at a level where it's easy to read and doesn't hurt people's eyes.

This was my foundational project in terms of building a website, I learnt a lot from that one project. One thing that was especially difficult and stood out to me in this project was having a responsive design that catered towards all users. That took me quite a while to learn and implement but I'm quite proud of the result.

Home Server - 2024 - current

My home server began when I had enough spare parts for a computer and I had heard the benefits of having a NAS. Having no experience and still using Windows at the time, I just started searching for which operating system I should use for a server. After a while of looking at different articles I went with TrueNAS as it was fairly simple but and also technical enough that I would learn from using it. It's definitely not something I would recommend, but I'm glad I went with it as being based off of Linux it meant I learnt some skills I could apply to other systems.

I also learnt a bit about how a server works on a general level, as I had gone in with no knowledge. After getting comfortable with it and realising its limitations I made the switch to Ubuntu Server. Thanks to TrueNAS I had a very basic understanding of the commands, but I still spent a lot of time reading through forum posts and documentation in combination with YouTube tutorials and explanations. I made plenty of mistakes and reinstalled the operating system a fair few times, but through all of the trial and error I gained some valuable experience and began to move away from tutorials and guides, even being able to figure some things out just from the command line.

On top of that, I learnt some important aspects about security. When I was searching for other opinions on the matter I found that a lot of articles were quite black and white whilst quite varying between different authors. Security itself can be quite objective, there's a list of things you can do and the more you do the more secure it is. That said, for me I don't want it to be an unnecessarily high cost to ease of access. I make sure that my security is above what I need to stay safe, but without restricting my administrative ability.

There's security through obscurity, you can't be attacked if attackers don't know your server exists. The most important thing is monitoring attacks and staying ahead of them, no need to have over the top security that makes remote access for you difficult if there's no threats. As long as you stay aware of threats then you can prepare for them.