About me

I'm Oliver Dodwell, a young programmer who's always been fascinated by technology ranging from simple calculators to artificial intelligence. Like many people my age, my first real experience with video games was on the Nintendo DS and whenever I was playing I kept getting distracted by wondering how each element interacts with each other and how it all comes together to create something as trivial as a game, which eventually led to me starting to learn Python in secondary school as part of computing lessons and experimenting with all the possibilities the language.

Recent Projects

Even now I primarily use Python 3 for programming, one recent project involving creating chat bots using the Discord API. The main chat bot I use provides features such as accessing my timetable for college, giving me details on lesson times and who the lesson is with for example as well as reading information from a .csv to provide information and notes on upcoming assignments whilst automatically calculating how many days I have until the submission deadline.

Work Placement

However, as part of my work placement for Brace IT, I have been learning Java in order to work on the main project and to be able to integrate other systems with it. Currently I have been experimenting with handling communications between the projects API and another systems API and learning more about the work environment in general.

University

After my current course at college, I will be going to university in September 2020. I have received offers from all of my options via UCAS, with my preferred choice being the Artificial Intelligence course at Oxford Brookes, Wheatley campus. Artificial Intelligence strays far from the traditional way of thinking about programming and is incredibly interesting in regards to how it is incredibly unique in how it works as well as the ethical and social implications of it and I want to see how it develops in the future given how much of an impact it will make and how it can be applied.