About me!

I'm Charlie, a 20 something year old born and raised in rural Herefordshire, in England. The son of an agricultural engineer, and a nurse, I've always had a keen interest in Engineering, and have a natural instinct when it comes to Physics and Mathematics. I graduated from the University of Oxford with a Masters degree in Engineering, Economics and Management in 2013.

During my degree, I continued my interest in music, playing the banjo in the Oxford University Ceilidh band, utilising the skills I had learned playing with the Lady Hawkins' School Ceilidh band - a Band 'n' Hope, for 7 years. Whilst playing in a Band 'n' Hope, I developed an interest in musical production technology, leading the sound desk, whilst playing in the band. This developed into providing sound and lighting for a variety of local shows.

Whilst at Oxford, I got involved with rowing. I rowed for one year, with mixed results - a couple of bumps in Torpids, and being bumped in eights. After realising that I had neither the build, nor the fitness, to row, I used my experience in coxing. For two years I coxed a mixture of boats, with mixed success. Ultimately, in my final year, I end up coxing the "Engibeering" boat, and subsequently ended up as the slowest boat on the river.

I developed an interest in programming, and computers quite early on. I started teaching myself the fundamentals of HTML when I was about 12, though this website is testimony to the fact that I still have plenty more to learn! I started learning QBASIC at school, and then started developing my own applications in Visual Basic. Nowadays, I've moved onto C#, and have plenty of projects in the pipeline - I'm just lacking the time to make progress on them. If you're interested in my IT work, then please visit www.charliehillgroup.com for more details.

My adult life has revolved mainly about work, and has involved a lot of moving around. During University I undertook summer placements at some major multinationals - I worked for 3 months developing video optimisation code for Sony, at Sony's Basingstoke headquarters, and I worked 3 months in the marketing department at John Deere in Mannheim, working on the original 6R tractors. My final 3 month placement came at HR Smith as an antenna design engineer. A small Herefordshire based company that develops location beacons for the aviation industry - the sort of thing that never helped to find flight MH370 (though that flight was not fitted with a HR Smith beacon!).

After graduating I returned to HR Smith. I returned as an electrical engineer, and worked developing software, firmware, and embedded circuits. The thought of some of my designs now being prominent in production beacons is terrifying and satisfying in equal measure. Eventually, though I got fed up of the small company attitude, and wanted something bigger and better than what Hereford had to offer. I moved back to Oxford, to join BMW and work as an acoustic quality specialist at MINI. I was enrolled onto the 2014 graduate scheme, and as part of that scheme, I am undertaking projects at different BMW facilities, to get an oversight of the business.

Which leads onto this website... after spending some time in Munich, Bavaria, working in the future and innovation centre of BMW, I wanted a way to share my experiences of Germany with family and friends, and create a way to keep the memories for myself.

So here we are, a photo album come memory bank, a series of thoughts and memories filed away for a rainy day.