Ask anyone who knows me, and they'll probably tell you the same thing - that I've always been a wee bit of a nerd. Since I was really young, even when I was a toddler, I've been fascinated with computers and how they work. Whenever my mum sat me down at the computer with a few CD games to play, I was always more intrigued by Access databases and accessing the hidden system folders on Windows XP.

Even despite some recurring nightmares in my earlier years, leading me to develop a slight fear of the computer (thinking it would grow legs and chase after me after a BSOD), I've always had such an interest in figuring out how they worked. When our first family PC eventually gave in and had to be thrown out, my only wish was to be able to unscrew the hard drive and examine the magnetic platter.

In 2011, at the age of 6, I was in the car with my mum driving home with school, asking her about how websites were made. She told me that they were made with a special type of code, which had me thinking that you could just write a random string of numbers in a Word document and have a fully functioning website. But, of course, I was wrong. After dinner that night, my mum sat me down with an empty Notepad window and showed me how to write my first page of HTML.

At that moment, I became totally hooked on web development. I bought my first domain a few months later, danielonline.net, and my first website showcasing some photos and information about myself went live - a copy of which is still available online.

That wasn't enough though, as before long, I was sitting down in front of Visual Studio trying to figure out how to make a Windows application with C#. SQL followed next, with me finishing my first real project - a point-of-sale system, fully complete with an inventory system, barcode scanning, receipt generation and more.

Soon I moved onto Java - developing plugins and mods for my Minecraft server. As I got older, my projects became more and more complex; different elements interacting with each other over the network, using different frameworks and libraries. My first iOS and Android app went live in 2020, and the plugins I've written for Minecraft servers have racked up thousands of users over the years. Attempting to develop Discord bots in a variety of languages, including Python and Ruby, led me on to finding my love for Node.js and TypeScript - my main tech stack today.