Introduction

Heya! I'm autumn, aka paradoxical autumn or paradox or justAnotherParadox... the pseudonyms continue. I'm a programmer and musician from the UK. Outside of that? Not much, just someone who's enjoying life.

Outside of those two things I enjoy photography, drawing, 3D animating, graphics design and finding new things to create.

Ever since I was a young person, I've been fascinated by the digital world mainly thanks to unrestricted internet access. Oh goodness, but it helped to turn me into the person I am today.

My love of music started even before that. Apparently, when I was probably 2 I was dancing to the anthems of the time and trying my best to create music with whatever I could find. Maybe when I was about 7, my dad had introduced me to an old and long forgotten app called "launchpad" (I think that was the name) which allowed me to create quick loops of music using premade samples. By the time I was 10, I was messing with the demo for FL Studio and, well... not getting very far as I wasn't allowed to download random files onto the family computer. Y'know, "random files" includes virtual instruments so I was basically stuck with the default set in FL at the time.

Education

I had a fairly normal education. I won't go into detail about most of it, but only the things that influenced me the most.

While I was in year 3 (or 2nd grade for you Americans out there) my school introduced me to a piece of software called Scratch, you might've heard of it. It allows you to create simple games using building blocks of code in a visual way and man, I was HOOKED. I don't remember what I created but I know that I made a lot. It even got to a point where my parents sent me to a (single) dedicated class about scratch where we made my most ambitious project yet, a (fairly simple) game where you're a shark trying to catch fish. Sounds simple, but bear in mind I was probably 7 when I was creating this.

It was also about this time that I was taking guitar lessons as a pass-time but nothing ever came from those. It only showed my passion for music, but I think that was emphasised by my love of music class.

...then came

Secondary Education

"Man, primary school was amazing! I wonder how much I'll like secondary??" ~ a foolish me

Secondary school for me was... difficult, but this isn't about that. I'm just glad I survived it, anyway. During year 8 I was taught a very basic version of python and I was amazed by what I could do. It started with a simple project to ask a user for their name and age and echo it back to them. Pretty simple.

...I did not keep it simple.

I realised that if you entered text during the age input, the program would crash due to incompatible types. So... I made it my goal to prevent that. I then found out about exception handling and looping, even before the teacher taught the rest of the class. Fun fact: I was never taught exception handling officially.

The teacher was (or at least acted) shocked that I managed to do this from a simple introduction where the most code we were expected to write was:

name = input("What's your name? ")
age = int(input("How old are you? "))
print("Hello, " + name + "! You are " + str(age))

...and yet I wrote something more like this:

name = input("What's your name?\n> ")
while True:
    try:
        age = int(input("How old are you?\n> "))
        break
    except TypeError:
        print("That's not a number!!")

print(f"Heya, {name}!! You're {age} but I don't know why I'd need to know that.")

in case you couldn't tell, my irreverence has been with me from a young age.

and again, remember this was my first time writing python code! Anyway, not much happened beyond that point except that I also learnt SQL (thanks AQA) and actually used it in a project at the time - Quoter - and I say I used it pretty decently!

2020

In 2020 the UK went into a lockdown and I had to complete my education at home. Not good. However, this is actually what introduced me properly to digital music creation and DAWs. My teacher introduced us to BandLab and I was amazed. Never before in my life was I properly told you could make music using technology and be properly recognised as a producer. This was ironic as I literally listened to deadmau5.

After realising that BandLab was exclusively online, I was slightly annoyed as I wanted to physically own the files, and not be tied to them forever. So, I started researching proper DAWs and eventually found Cakewalk. I hadn't "escaped" BandLab but I have no problem with them. They're a cool company! I just want to own my files.

(Into) College

For college, I was studying games design which seemed like the perfect fit for me because "programming + music = :D" So, I picked up the demo for FL Studio and loved it. The only thing I did not love was the price.

So, what did I do? I lied to my parents and said "hey can you help me purchase this software I'll definitely use at college? I'll pay for half of it!" I did keep my promise but I never actually used FL at college lol. I exclusively used it for personal projects. Whoops.

It was also at college that I picked up website design. Once I had a musical portfolio I decided to create a website for myself. I started out with Carrd but eventually wanted more control over my work because, as is standard for me, I wanted to own my files. I then quickly taught myself HTML and CSS and started working on some projects. My initial ones were... pretty good! But obviously weren't amazing.

It was also during college that I hated, then picked up again, then hated again, then picked up again, then hated working professionally on, art!