#MeetAGradThursday — Adam Sofokleous
Hey all, my name is Adam, I’m 24 and I was born and bred in North London. I was your average 90’s kid, I rode my bike around Oakwood park, climbed trees, played football in the streets, and mastered Pokemon Yellow. I was a WWE fanatic as well, and regularly explained myself for my little sister’s broken dolls. Anyway, nostalgia aside, when I was around 10 my family and I moved to Cyprus, the island of sea, sun and souvla. We joined some of my extended family, and lived in the amazing city of Limassol. It took me a good few years to grasp the new environment, but it eventually became a comfortable life. I got back into football, joining the Apoel youth academy, started skateboarding and I even taught myself guitar. When I was about 13, my Dad bought me my first computer. A Pentium 4, 512mb RAM BEAST. It actually served me a good few months before I fried the onboard gfx card - Rise of Nations got the best of it. That’s also when I first started mucking around with graphics in GIMP, cutting out faces and swapping them for other body parts. Through taking D&T at GCSE and Computing as an A level, I found myself being more and more intrigued by writing code and building software. I guess that eventually led to me playing around with BASIC, VB, php and other software tech at the time.
Going through high school I took part in a few plays, achieved my GCSEs & A levels, graduated and as every Cypriot boy has to do at 18, I joined the national service. It was a real struggle to begin with, as I hadn’t yet picked up any of the language. I know, 8 years living in Cyprus and my London accent was still ‘propa’. Being an English kid thrown into a strict and closed off place like the military, had me wondering how long it would last from day 1. It turned around for me though, and I quickly got to grips with: the waking up at 6am every day, having a spotless bed and locker by 6:10am, having a clean, well-oiled and most importantly securely locked gun — daily and just the routines in general. What an experience that was, being taught how to drive the massive trucks that I had only seen in movies, making new friends, firing a G3A3 every month. These made it hard to forget.
After a long and eventually boring 18 months, I finished my service, went back home and found a job for the summer. I worked in an Adidas Outlet store, you know, a shop for the old clothing lines that get discounted a little. I worked there for 6 months, saving up enough money for university the coming September. When the time came around, I applied for various Web Design courses around the UK. It was quite daunting, the wait for responses, but eventually they came through. UWE had accepted me for a Digital Media course, which looked like a good balance of web design and graphic design. Off I went!
University life, if you’re a student and you’re reading this, then you should probably be sorting your life out! It’s great though, I learnt a lot from my course, especially the fundamentals of the web, which I’d still be clueless about to this day. REST as a concept has massively helped when building and connecting to APIs and understanding how and what is going on across that connection. My final year project also gave me enough independent time to explore where my skills lie. That’s about the time I discovered NodeJS. Up to then I was quite used to building on your standard LAMP stack. None of this async malarkey. So I set myself some goals and built a Node-based foreign-food-finding web app that used Foursquare’s API and a Javascript framework called Hoodie. My end goal was to build something offline-first (hence Hoodie’s architecture and philosophy), that would persist even without an active connection. It would have been fantastic, but through my research I found it just wasn’t feasible given the time frame. I managed to get into a new sport at university, volleyball. I thought it was a bit silly to begin with given I was a complete noob, but the techniques are actually pretty easy to pick up and in no time I was practicing with the 1st team. I didn’t quite make the league team, but I was elected Vice President, with my lovely girlfriend Lou, as President. How corrupt does that sound?!
Nowadays I still get my hands dirty in NodeJS, and plenty Javascript. When joining the Alacrity Foundation and going through the initial bootcamp, I was introduced to Laravel. Another amazing framework used for building for the web. One that my team and I are currently building our API with. I also play religious amounts of PS4, most notably Rocket League and BF1, but I’ll binge on Diablo III any night of the week. My soundtrack of choice is usually underground, be it hip hop, drum and bass or grime. But if you went through my Spotify playlist you’ll find artists from Wu Tang to Maribou State. You could catch me nodding away to some classic funky beats like Grandmaster Flash one day, and Led Zeppelin another - There’s nothing quite like variety!
Thanks for reading!
And if you’re up for getting in touch, I’m on Facebook & LinkedIn.
For gamers, my PSN is adamino_2.
Stay classy!
Adam Sofokleous
Technical Lead of Team 13
