About me

Hi! I'm Hayden. I'm a software engineer turned platform engineer from the UK. I'm a 21-year old from the UK, based in Sheffield.

I'm... reasonably active online, tending to spend my time playing games, working on personal projects, or otherwise being offline with friends or my partner in the meatspace.

I'm proudly autistic and bisexual, possibly a little ADHD, though I don't care enough to sit through the multiple-generations-long waiting list with the NHS to find out 'officially', I'm lucky enough to not have my mental state be too obstructive to my work or my life.

My interests

I'm a pretty open book when it comes to my interests, in that I don't have tons to begin with. In my free time, I usually end up trying to bend computers to my will programming or learning new compsci concepts and disciplines.

Primarily over the past couple years, my interest has been in the sort of mid-level computing stuff. Not quite end-user, like web apps and iOS apps, not quite low-level, like kernels or drivers, but more infrastructure. One of my big interests is playing around with self-hosting various apps & services on my home Kubernetes cluster, Phoebe, as well as playing with the not-quite-end-user style of software, like AT Proto Personal Data Servers, which I think are cool for reasons I'm sure I'll explain in a blog post at some point in time.

Outside of programming, though... I enjoy gaming, particularly military simulators ('milsims') and flight simulators, but rarely the middle of that venn diagram, I'm much more of a "1000 hours in Arma 3 and MSFS 2024" person than a "500 hours in Arma 3, 700 in War Thunder" person.

As with any 18-year-old, I went through a phase of constantly going out to drink with friends and going to clubs and such, but these days I much prefer sitting with some mates at a nice dive bar, just having a natter and shooting the proverbial shit with them for a few hours.

My toolchain

Computers

  • titan: my arch install, also my main dev setup and recently gaming too
  • tethys: my windows install, mainly for flight sim reasons
  • phoebe: my (currently) single-node talos linux cluster running my self-hosted services

Note: I used to use NixOS on Phoebe before a brief trial of Proxmox followed by a full conversion to Talos. But... I fell out of love with Nix, and NixOS has its own issues.

Programming Languages

In order of my most to least enjoyed & loved:

  • Rust
  • Go
  • TypeScript
  • Kotlin
  • C# (specifically .NET)
  • Java
  • JavaScript (TypeScript is infinitely better)
  • ...
  • ...
  • ...
  • Python (sorry, had to really show how much i dislike it with the ...s above)

Now, this list isn't exhaustive, and I pick up new languages pretty quick, so I'm sure it'll grow over time.

Editor

Primarily, I use Neovim, which is a fork of Vim with some extra quality-of-life features like Lua for configuration over Vimscript/VimL, and built-in LSP support.

If you want to see or try out my config, it lives on GitHub.