I like building things, I like breaking things. But most importantly I like breaking enough that I've somehow made something spectacular. I've been programming personally for over 15 years and I've faced a lot of challenges, not all of them simple "if else" problems, and I've yet to find something that if I don't break enough logic, code, and brain cells I can't get it working.

My view on problem-solving is to try to think outside the box as much as possible and attempt to simplify problems down to their logical core and then build up from there. In my opinion, there are a couple of things that come along with simplifying a problem:

• The most complex problems can have the simplest solutions.

• Explaining it to someone is far easier when it's more simple.

• Finally, it makes tackling the problem far less daunting if there is a lot less to think about when planning for it.

I learned this lesson early when I was building my first game at 11. The gravity was giving me quite a headache because I could make things move, but I couldn't make it so that the player could walk and jump because there was nothing for them to jump on.

My solution? Gravity pulls things down, right? So start with a character that's infinitely moving down. Now make the "floor" and set the character's vertical velocity to 0 when x amount of pixels from the centre of the floor sprite. 2 weeks after I started the game, I had a character that could fall onto the floor.

After making my first game though I found that I wasn't a big fan of game development because I am too big of a fan of gaming. I got into gaming because of the challenge of the puzzle and the learning required to pass a level or build a better base, when I build the game I know too much about it and there is no mystery.

So instead I started looking at other puzzles that code could help me with. So from the age of 13, I started looking into "being a hacker" learning the absolute basics of things like password security and encryption.

This was very intriguing to me, but the problem comes in that I don't like "tearing things down" I like creating things, so becoming a hacker doesn't scratch that itch

That's when my IT teacher taught us about servers and I knew what I was going to be doing for a long time. Since then I've loved how different tech stacks could be evolved to accomplish the most intricate of services, like having a button to auto-order coffee, or a service that multiple people can join in and do callouts together but friends could be sitting in another channel playing a different game (At the time Team Speak)

I loved the whole concept of building from this point. I was hooked, and ever since then, I've been trying to improve my architecture and development skills so that I can build the most efficient system possible. I don't get it all the time, as with most things in development a lot of things require iteration, but I have no problem ripping apart a service I've built to squeeze out as much as possible.

This is where my love of data comes in, I used to only use data to try and make my code as efficient as possible by using the data around CPU/Memory utilisation to find blocking points, but I soon learned that the same logic that I used for that could make a lot of other things. I soon learned that data is the key to understanding how and why things happen, everything can be broken down into data points that can then be mapped and patterns uncovered. That is the new challenge that I've given myself is to learn how to find those patterns, and once I've found the pattern maybe I can use it in a cool way.

A good example of this is my financials, I come from a household with little money so I started looking into what I could to make our lives better. So I built a script that took down a CSV of my latest transactions cleans it and groups the transactions together. From there I could easily plot out what I was spending too much on. With that simple script, I've managed to put myself in a much better place financially. And that is why I love data.