I'm Thomas Hall (full name Thomas Derrick Ralseimai Hall), and I'm a 16 year old server host and LInux enthusiast living in Greenhithe, United KIngdom! You've landed on my portfolio, where I show off all of my work over the years, and even tell my story of how I got to where I am now, as well as answering a few questions!
Since the age of 5 from around November 2014, I have been completely and utterly obsessed with computers and technology. It can all be traced back to when I got my first experience with a laptop in primary school in year 1, this being a Dell Vostro 1540 running Windows 7 Pro. I used this to play a lot of EducationCity, as well as writing my own stories on Word '09. Even though Windows 8 was out by the time I started using this laptop, Windows 7 became something I would see almost every day, and soon, I was obsessed. In 2015, my dad would also start to loan me his HP Pavillion G6, also running Windows 7, to play educational games just like EducationCIty and even PurpleMash.Â
When I got to year 3, around 2017, I started taking IT classes full time. These were mainly simple tasks: How to use PowerPoint, how to use Word... simple stuff like that. These lessons were very easy for me, but I could feel myself wanting to challenge myself just a little bit more. Well, in 2019, one year before the dreaded Coronavirus hit, I had learned how to write my first form of batch code, which was a simple app that repeated whatever you put into it for an unlimited amount of times - the best thing is that the task was completely unrelated to what I was doing, so I was effectively getting a head start, not knowing what a hell of a journey this was going to take me on.
In 2020, when I was in year 6, schools were cut off entirely due to the Coronavirus outbreak. Trips and events I had been anticipating had been cancelled right there and then. This was an event unprecedented for me, and it seemed like I was trapped indoors for basically the rest of my life. Well, thats what I would have thought If i hand't received my first Raspberry Pi just a few months earlier at Christmas, this being the Raspberry Pi 3 B+. This blew me away even on the first time I used it. It was tiny, very tiny. Until then I was only really used to seeing computers that were big and bulky, so the concept of the Raspberry Pi was practically alien to me. Unfortunately, I had fried the motherboard several months after getting it after plugging a module in wrong, but there was another thing just waiting for me a few months later.
Come August 2020, I finally turned 11 and was moving into year 7, and I had gotten my first personal laptop and phone, these being an HP Stream 11 and Huawei Y6s respectively. It wasn't the best laptop in the world, that's for definite, however this was my first personal one, so I was over the moon with it... until my mum took my laptop away from me in December and I never saw it again, but I wont get into that. I used this laptop mainly for homework, but I was also into a game called BENO Skyscrapersim, a lift/building simulator which was fully customisable, and you bet I had some fun tweaking the values in there!
Throughout my secondary school life, I was mostly harassed for my interest of computers, but through the harassement, through years 7 to 11, through the pain and tears, I made it through with my studies in art, product design and computer science. However, in August 2024, I founded The OneLyte Association (which at the time was called Freakcircle) with my fellow colleague Josh (aka Jibbosh), which originally started off as a meme record label, but eventually grew to social federation as my interest in that topic, along with server hosting, grew still further.
And then, we come to now, where I am now attending London South East Colleges Bexley as a Level 1 IT student. I'm now using a Lenovo v130-14ikb 81HQ laptop for on-the-go work and as my main machine, and a Motorola Moto e20 (soon to be upgraded to a Honor X6c at Christmas) as my main phone. From the beginning I knew I had a passion in computers, but now, it has ballooned into something never seen before. That passion will continue to grow as I move forward in my life.
I'm on most major social media platforms, both by ThomasOneLyte and InternetRalsei. I use these 2 identities to split my professional and casual sides in half. Below is a full list of my social media across the 2 identities. You will also be able to find all of my work for both identities there! Find them both below!
I'm always open to start collaborating with other members of the public, providing that your request is within reason and with what I do. Send me an email on thomas.hall@onelyte.uk. or on The OLA Discord server at https://discord.gg/eB6mvGb5Qq - I look forward to talking with you!
