Why CaretC...?

I remember one particular evening when I was very young. My dad came into my room rather late to tell me to go to sleep and promptly let out an almighty YELP. He had stood on a 555 timer.

The explanation, such as it is, was that my grandad had given me a load of old PCBs. From what, I couldn’t tell you, but I’d spent hours removing all the ICs and carefully arranging them by the numbers printed on top. Apparently, I hadn’t been quite so careful about where I’d left them. Of all the components it could have been, it had to be a 555 timer.

My poor dad.

To be fair, the fascination had started well before that. I remember practically monopolising a science encyclopaedia from the local library. I don’t think any of the other local kids stood much chance of borrowing it, because I seemed to have it permanently on loan. I couldn’t even tell you exactly what it was about that book, but I devoured it. I’d spend hours staring at the pictures, trying to make sense of things I didn’t yet understand.

Electrical things were a particular fascination. Circuit boards, components, cables, anything really. Our next-door neighbour, who was a linesman, even brought me a collection of stripped-down cable offcuts, ranging from 600 V cables right up to 33 kV. Something I now appreciate must have taken him an age to prepare. I also rather inadvisably took apart the family television and discovered, somewhat directly, why a live-chassis TV of that era was called precisely that.

Thankfully, I’ve learned a little about electrical safety since then.

None of which explains CaretC yet, I know. The name came much later, and this website is actually my fourth attempt at doing something with it. To make sense of either, though, I should probably get to the computers.

My first computer, if you can call it that, wasn’t so much a computer as a word processor. I believe it was one of the Amstrad machines, complete with a lovely black and green screen and a rather stylish dot-matrix printer. I was given it after my dad upgraded to a proper Windows 95 PC.

I cannot begin to explain how many hours I spent playing with this machine. The majority of my efforts, as far as I can remember, centred around nesting very random notes in directories called things like Secret/keepOut/noReally. When I wasn’t doing that, I was no doubt busy making as much ‘music’, or more accurately, racket, on the dot-matrix printer as I possibly could. As unproductive as all of this was, it certainly kept me entertained.

A few years later, in what I can only assume was 1998, I inherited that previously mentioned Windows 95 PC from my dad. This time it was broken, and it came with little more than the installation disks and a see if you can make it work.

So I did the only logical thing… kept on fiddling.

I had no internet, nobody to ask, just nine-year-old me and this machine. I’m not entirely sure how I managed to get everything installed. Somewhere in the depths of my memory, I remember wrestling with getting the A: drive recognised, but somehow I got it working.

And from that moment on, I was hooked.

Now, I wouldn’t want to give the impression that getting a computer working suddenly made me some sort of child prodigy. Far from it. For the next few years, computers mostly meant one thing to me: GAMES. An awful lot of games, actually. But somewhere along the way, just playing them stopped being enough. I desperately wanted to make one of my own.

Then, in 2001, something happened that seemed like it might help. I was taken to the library at my dad’s university and told I could borrow any book I wanted. Naturally, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of books, not to mention the challenge of navigating the Dewey Decimal System. Eventually, I managed to find my way to the computing section.

Armed with a burning desire to make games and absolutely no idea where to start, I did what any sensible budding game developer would do. I picked the thickest, most serious-looking book I could find.

HTML.

And for the next month, that was it. I worked through this book page by page, taking far too long to realise that it was not, in fact, going to teach me how to make games. But alas, that was no barrier at all. I could make cool websites that pretended to hack things, pretended to be viruses and all sorts of other increasingly questionable creations. My poor, poor parents.

As it turned out, I’d stumbled into something I enjoyed just as much as playing games. I could make the computer do things, even if those things were largely ridiculous.

Somewhere around this time, and I’ve no idea quite how, I found my way to the early .NET website and its VB and C# tutorials. I remember eagerly working through them until I was scared off for several months by the discovery of something called string. Yes, really.

Once I’d recovered from that particular ordeal, I carried on through the tutorials, producing an endless collection of highly bespoke and increasingly unhinged Windows Forms applications. To give myself some credit, they were gradually becoming more useful and complex, although I’m not sure the world was particularly in need of most of them.

Then came Morrowind.

When it arrived in 2002, I honestly had no idea a game could be something like that. The sheer scale of it, the environments, the towns, all those NPCs. It felt like an entire world rather than simply a game to play through. I could wander off, find something completely unexpected and disappear into it for hours. I was absolutely fascinated that somebody had managed to make all of this.

Then my friends and I discovered the Construction Set. Not only had somebody built this enormous world, but we could actually mess about with it ourselves.

Naturally, our first contribution was to add massively overpowered weapons right at the start of the game, inside the lighthouse, if memory serves. But before long we were experimenting with NPCs, scripts and increasingly ambitious ideas, with decidedly mixed results. I remember a particularly deadly mudcrab.

We’d also discovered MWScript, and with it a whole new world of programming. Looking at it now, it seems much closer to something from the BASIC or Pascal family, but back then it felt like C. Honestly, twelve-year-old me thought I was writing C and adding all this functionality to the real game engine. I know now that wasn’t quite what was happening, but hey, we had a hell of a time.

I’d say this was around the point where things started getting a little more serious. I got books on C and C++ and devoured them, making everything from Snake to some truly obscure applications. The pointer crimes that must have existed in those programs make me shudder.

It was also around this time, through IRC and forums, that my knowledge really started growing. There were people out there doing all sorts of interesting things with computers, and one thing would lead to another until I found myself several layers deeper into something I barely understood when I started.

This inevitably led to my early adventures with Linux, including, if memory serves, a particularly painful tour of Mandrake. I was fascinated by being able to poke around in parts of the operating system that had previously been a complete mystery to me. Of course, I didn’t always know what I was doing, and sometimes things went rather badly wrong.

This is where I discovered that if you messed up and frantically mashed Ctrl-C to try to prevent whatever disaster you were about to unleash, you’d sometimes be greeted with ^C in the terminal.

Now, I had absolutely no idea what the ^ symbol was actually called. Until, of all people, I asked a newspaper printer at a museum.

A caret.

And that was that. CaretC.

What started as a slightly obscure handle has now followed me around the internet for something like 23 years. It’s still my GitHub username and, in many ways, has just become the part of myself I’ve always been happy to put out there. We’ve been through a fair amount together.

It also serves as a rather personal reminder of those early days, when I was poking around in unfamiliar parts of an operating system, not entirely sure what I was doing but having a fantastic time finding out. Every now and then, even now, I’ll find myself deep in some obscure technical problem, pulling at threads and discovering things I had no idea existed.

Those days are hard to beat.

And then, in 2006, along came Oblivion.

I thought Morrowind had blown my mind, but apparently there was still some room left. Oblivion was extraordinary to me, but almost as fascinating as the game itself was the documentary about how it had been made.

I watched that documentary an absolutely ridiculous number of times. Honestly, I must have seen it a hundred times, and I still occasionally go back and watch it now. Seeing the work that went into creating those environments, characters and systems was fascinating. Here were actual people making these enormous, complicated worlds that I’d spent so much time exploring.

I think that was the point where I became absolutely certain that, one day, I would work with computers. I was equally certain that I’d be making games.

Well, I’ve managed the computers part.

Still working on the games.

Of course, these days my professional engineering head occasionally has to step in and prevent some of my more questionable ideas from becoming expensive mistakes. But the desire to fiddle with things I probably shouldn’t hasn’t really gone anywhere. I’m still notoriously nosy whenever I find myself around interesting industrial machinery or installations, much to my wife’s horror.

Since those early exploits, I’ve followed a rather varied engineering path: electrician, marine engineer, electrical engineer, software engineer, ethical hacker and quite a few things in between. It hasn’t exactly been a straight line, and I’m not sure I’d have wanted it to be.

So that’s where the name came from. The website, on the other hand, has taken a few more attempts to get going.

As I mentioned earlier, this is attempt number four at turning CaretC into something resembling a proper website. Attempts one and two barely made it beyond registering the domain, largely because of a rather crippling dose of imposter syndrome. Who was I to publish all this grandiose content? What exactly did I have to say that anyone else would find interesting? I won’t lie, those questions still bother me.

Attempt three actually went pretty well. It had some cool content and was starting to become something I was pleased with. Unfortunately, I was also working full-time as a lead electrical engineer while studying full-time for my BSc. As you might imagine, there weren’t an enormous number of spare hours kicking about, and eventually I just couldn’t keep up with it.

So what’s different this time? Well, primarily, I’m deliberately taking it slowly. There’s no grand launch planned, no promise of weekly articles and certainly no intention of turning this into another obligation. It’s a slow burn, something I can add to as I work on things rather than something I have to constantly find content for.

I suppose the original idea was to create some form of portfolio, and in a way I imagine that’s still what this site will become. But the more I’ve thought about it, the less interested I’ve become in simply presenting a polished collection of finished projects.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some fantastic engineering articles and YouTube videos out there. I enjoy them enormously. But sometimes I find that everything has been polished to the point where the most interesting part of the story has disappeared. Why did somebody decide to devote a ridiculous amount of time to this particular problem? What were they originally trying to do? What went wrong along the way? And perhaps most importantly, why did they bother in the first place?

I find those questions fascinating, partly because my own projects often start in much the same way. I’ll get curious about some bit of tooling or an obscure technical problem, end up spending far too long making a demonstration just to see whether I can, and then move on to something else entirely. Most of these little investigations go nowhere in particular, but occasionally one turns into something worth pursuing properly.

And that’s what I’d like CaretC to capture. Not just the finished result, but some of the thinking, wrong turns and general messing about that went into getting there. As much as anything, it’s a way of forcing myself to organise my thoughts, document what I’m doing and perhaps even finish a few of the ideas that have been rattling around in my head for years.

I’ve got all sorts of things I’d like to explore: tools, papers, AI experiments and plenty of other ideas that may or may not amount to much. Some will undoubtedly turn into dead ends, but I hope a few will become something real. As small as some of them might be, I think they matter in a way. And, well, they matter to me.

I’d also love to make a CaretC YouTube channel one day. I haven’t quite found the time, or perhaps the courage, for that yet, so I figured a website was a reasonable place to start. And in this era of AI, there’s something about recording the human, occasionally chaotic side of these projects that feels increasingly important to me. I’m not entirely sure I can explain why, but perhaps that’s another article for another day.

If nobody much reads this site beyond myself and a handful of nosy LinkedIn recruiters, I don’t think I’ll consider that a failure. If it gives me somewhere to work through ideas and encourages me to actually finish a few things, that’s already worthwhile.

And if somebody does stumble across it, particularly somebody a bit like the younger me, perhaps they’ll enjoy seeing that you don’t necessarily need to know exactly what you’re doing, or even why you’re doing it, to have a wonderful time exploring something. The process can be messy, difficult, occasionally ridiculous and sometimes far more interesting than whatever you originally set out to build.

Ultimately, if I look back at CaretC in a couple of years and it’s still here, hasn’t gone stale, and I’ve managed to turn a few of these ideas into something real, I’ll be rather pleased with that.

So, if you feel like following along, expect to see one thing…

^C