About Me
Hello! My name is Ruaridh. I’m a 16 year old student from Scotland with a strong passion for technology. This page serves as my About Me where you can learn about me, my passions, skills and interests!
Education and Career Prospects
As of 6th August 2024, I have just finished my National 5 exams and am now studying for Higher exams. Higher exams in Scotland are the type that are required to apply for university or similar roles like an Apprenticeship.
I’m eager to do an Apprenticeship at a Fintech with an office near me, such as JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley or Barclays. These applications are handled separately from UCAS so there are no restrictions on how many I can apply for.
Alternatively, I would like to go to university to study Computer Science although I don’t particularly have a university preference yet. What I do know is that most of the universities I am considering desire multiple A grades, usually in at least Maths and Computer Science at a Higher level. I would like to go to a university close enough that I can commute to it rather than having to live away from home to save money. As of writing, university is free for Scottish students attending Scottish universities and is paid for by SAAS.
Interests
Currently my primary interests are in building and maintaining computers and computer systems. I have a VPS that I host a Discord music bot on and I also run a modded Minecraft server for my friends, currently it’s running SkyFactory 4.
I’m also interested in Retro Gaming. Currently I am playing games like Wii Sports Resort and CTGP-R (modded Mario Kart Wii) on my Wii complete with tools to do things like enabling community-ran online connectivity. In addition to this I’m also making lots of hardware changes to my Gameboy Advance which was generously given to me by a friend. I am replacing the screen with a modern IPS one and the outer casing and buttons with brand new ones to help further my knowledge of computer hardware and how these devices work.
I also really like building physical servers and running a small homelab. Currently it is just built out of Raspberry Pis but also at one point contained a decomissioned Office PC that was later gifted to a friend. The Raspberry Pi 3Bs both run a variety of software, one runs ADS-B software to track the positions of all sorts of aircraft and feed that to FlightAware and Flightradar24. Another runs Portainer on Ubuntu 22.04, this server runs awesome projects like Mealie, Homarr and NGINX Proxy Manager for local SSL certificate management.
I’m also quite interested in Business. Both studying it at school but also exploring how different companies are ran, how they make their money, how they brand themselves, etc. I’ve had aspirations before of running a company but they have never really came to fruition though I do help friends run some aspects of their businesses from time to time.
Favourite Content Creators
At the moment, I’m obsessed with a YouTube channel called James Channel. It’s ran by a close friend of a larger creator, DankPods, named James where he uses his knowledge of repairing technology to make interesting modifications to retro games consoles.
He’s made many amazing videos centred around hilarious topics like making a bootleg NES play NES cartridge games that are rife with janky engineering and amazing humour.
Another honorable mention is the TLDR News family of channels. They cover topics from politics, economics, business and so much more. All in a format that is easily digestable to the average person and very entertaining. They’ve even launched their own newspaper which you can get here.
What I’m Listening to
I’m primarily listening to artists like AJR in my spare time but now I also listen to a lot of older music from the likes of Bruce Springsteen and The Beatles. I’m also starting to listen to some new music from names such as Gorillaz as I explore what music my friends enjoy.
Thanks for reading! Hopefully this has given you some insight into me as a person and the things I love. :)
-Ruaridh