Hello! My name is Richard Bowey. I’m a 28 year old Programmer, Back-end Developer & Gamer from the United Kingdom. I'm working as a Software Developer for Synergi Tech.
In my free time, I enjoy a spot of gaming and talking to friends online. I’ve built up a community of people of whom I speak to on a regular basis. I also enjoy livestreaming the games I play with friends on Twitch in the evenings, a few times a week. I really enjoy sharing this experience with others and interacting with people who are watching along.
I’ve been programming in some form or another for many years now, dating back to writing scripts to add functionality to games and to cause general chaos with friends at school. Since then, I’ve refined my skills and focused more on productive applications.
My early projects consisted of online chatbots as I found that those are simple projects for learning new programming languages. I’ve since learned how to build and maintain professional websites, write easy to maintain code and manage server infrastructure for the many systems I currently work on.
My current job covers a lot of programing aspects too! My day-to-day tasks usually cover building new features, developing new systems and managing support tickets from clients. As well as this, I like to assist with some Open Source projects from time to time, like the Slack bot ‘Whiskers’.
When I’m not developing and squashing bugs, I enjoy running online communities for programming and games. I currently spend a lot of my down time talking to members of a group that I’ve been managing for over 10 years called “Land of Kittens” (LoK for short) which aims to be a safe and friendly place to hang out for anyone of any background.
It’s not just software that I like to tinker with, I also enjoy playing with computer hardware too! I’m currently in the process of upgrading my home network ready to run some home-lab equipment to further aid my skills in both hardware and software.
You can also find me messing around with servers too. I currently run a lot of web solutions and services from these (including this website) and I love to try new technologies and methods to keep up to date with the latest practices.
My original hobby in life was always computing. Since a very young age, I remember being around computers and helping my dad build new machines is still one of my strongest memories.
Throughout my entire educational life, I’ve shown further interest in playing around with new hardware and software. For a period around Year 8-10, I was part of a team of students that helped maintain our school website. I was in charge of writing new content and adding news and events to the website.
During my time at college, I helped run a lunchtime workshop to teach people how to use basic computer software such as the Microsoft Office Suite and how to browse the internet. We also fixed broken screens and damaged machines owned by the students and staff on campus.
Whilst where I currently stand in life is outlined above, my future is still yet to be decided. I’m unsure if I want to stay in the programming line of work or migrate over to a data center style job which happens to be another passion of mine. I like to keep my options open so that my potential in life is not limited.