Biography

Background

Hey! My name is Andrew Close. I am currently 17 years old and am heading into my senior year at William Mason High School. I am very interested in going into Computer Science as a career, specifically as a software engineer. I am also extremely passionate about photography, and it is my favorite hobby, period. At school, I partake in my school’s photography club. It’s a very relaxed club - I don’t have many responsibilities in it. But, many photos I took during meetings have ended up in my portfolio, and it has helped me practice my skills in photography. Additionally, I am also involved in my school’s National STEM Honor Society chapter. In that club, I learned what it’s like to work on a real life project with others.

My Skills

At the time of writing this, I know Java and Python, and I have also practiced backend frameworks built around those languages like Spring Boot and Flask. I also know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This website wouldn’t exist without those languages, of course. And even now, I am still learning more and more languages and concepts.

Learning is one of my favorite pastimes! I like to spend my free time practicing my skills and expanding my knowledge. I’d like to learn about more languages, like the C family and possibly newer languages like Rust. I would also like to learn about other useful technologies like Docker. I’ll make sure to update this website whenever I learn new languages and tools.

How I Made This Website

In March 2025, I ended up on a team of 4 against 30 other individuals, pitted against each other in spirit of the hackathon we were attending. After 8 hours of hard work, me and my team came out on top, and we won the hackathon among the high school group. The reward - a mini server for each of us. At that moment, I knew I had unlocked amazing new opportunities.

Around the beginning of my summer break, I got to work, the end goal being to end up hosting a website on my server. I had already installed Ubuntu Server on it, so then it was just a matter of installing and setting up the right architecture to host the website. I bought and established my domain name from Namecheap and setup DNS records to point to my home router. I setup port forwarding to forward incoming requests to my server. I setup NGINX serverblocks to listen for the forwarded requests, and I generated an SSL certificate with certbot. The whole process took a week, and it didn’t come without confusion, troubleshooting, and staying up late a bit longer than I usually do. But inevitably, the result was similar to what you are seeing right now.

That’s right - this website was setup completely from scratch, starting with zero knowledge about deployment. After successfully deploying a website on my server, I feel that I have gained proficiency in working with Linux, DNS providers, and NGINX, among other things, and I feel confident that I would be able to do it all over again, if I ever had to. The journey to creating this website was very enjoyable, and it’s funny to think that it all started with winning a hackathon.