Finbar Burns

Background

About Finbar Burns

I am a psychology graduate with a keen interest in both people and technology. I am a very computer literate person, my main hobby is building and tinkering with computers and operating systems which has made me a methodical worker and good problem solver. I also love to go hiking in the mountains and take pictures with my DSLR camera. I have an avid fascination with computers, I love to install new programs and experiment with them. Enthusiast knowledge of computer hardware from building my own PCs. Extensive experience with a wide range of software and operating systems including running virtual desktop environments using VirtualBox and Linode as well as familiarity with Visual Studio Code, GitHub and photo editing. In the process of building up a low budget home lab which currently consists of an old PC running TrueNas Scale. This acts as a NAS and runs a virtual machine with a program called Kasm installed on Ubuntu which can start containerised apps in the browser. Otherwise, the NAS stores some backups and my photography library. Currently self-teaching CSS, HTML and JavaScript for front end development skills. Working on building a website using React. Resources used are primarily MDN web docs created by Mozilla, javascript.info, Harvard CS50 course online, various YouTube video series as well as plenty of trial and error. Recently attended my first ever Hackathon at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Studying psychology helped me to develop many key skills and experiences. I gained a significant amount of experience doing professional presentations with a scientific context once a week to a well informed and academically minded audience. I was also able to develop my skills using complex statistical software, such as SPSS, and become familiar working with large datasets consisting of many different variables and values. Finally, I was able to develop my skills of talking to people in a one on one or group setting during my Counselling Module. This module took place in my third year and was by far my favourite.