About

I'm Darren, an Irish doctor turned AI engineer, based in Belfast. I studied medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and spent around a decade working in emergency medicine and urgent care. That work taught me a lot that I still use: making decisions under pressure, working with systems where mistakes matter and seeing how technology is used in practice (which is rarely quite how its designers imagined it).

My route into computing started over lunch. A good friend who worked in IT suggested I might enjoy coding, so I tried a short online course with the Code Institute. What began as a hobby and a distraction gradually became something I wanted to pursue seriously.

When I get interested in something, I tend to want a qualification in it. In this case, that meant higher diplomas in computer science and software engineering, a certificate in artificial intelligence and eventually a First-Class Honours MSc in AI at Queen's University Belfast. I suppose the lunch suggestion got slightly out of hand.

For my MSc research, I fine-tuned DNABERT-2, a genomic language model, to classify colorectal enhancer sequences. The preprint and code are linked under Selected work. Medicine still shapes some of what I work on, but I'm just as happy deep in a networking problem with no patient in sight.

At the keyboard

Python is my main language, but a lot of my spare time goes into Linux, Bash and networking. I've recently turned a spare Dell laptop into a Proxmox home lab, complete with Linux virtual machines and an NVIDIA GPU passed through to Ubuntu. It's a fun little side project that has taught me more about hardware, virtualisation and networking than I expected to learn.

Containers, security and system design are increasingly competing for my attention. There's something satisfying about working through a problem from a terminal rather than clicking around in a GUI. I'm one of those people with several projects underway and a fairly generous definition of "nearly finished".

This website is where I document that work and write about what I'm learning. It's also a project in its own right; I'm building it with help from AI tools, making changes myself and getting to grips with the parts of the stack that are new to me.

Away from the computer

Resistance training is a regular fixture and, true to form, it came with a qualification: a National Certificate in Personal Training from the Elite Fitness & Performance Academy in Dublin. The aim was to know what I was doing under a barbell, and now I do.

I get through an unreasonable number of audiobooks. Douglas Stuart is a favourite, alongside John Boyne's The Heart's Invisible Furies, Alice Winn's In Memoriam and Michael Magee'sClose to Home. I have a weakness for good prose and men making questionable emotional decisions.

Between books, there's a lot of RedHanded. Apparently, my idea of switching off involves a pair of AirPods and either unresolved longing or a crime scene.