This site is the personal site of Juna Oliver.
If you have any issues, please report them to my email!
Downloads on this website are handeled through dropbox.

Hi!

I'm Juna, I am 16 and I like to code. I speak English and Dutch.
she/her - transfem - autistic

Timeline

This is a very brief overview of just a few key events.

Migration

I was born in London and lived there until I was 11. After that my family and I moved to the Netherlands, just a few months before the brexit transition period ended. This was also right in between covid lockdowns.
When we moved to the Netherlands it was on very short notice. The deadline for being able to move there was fast approaching. While it would have been possible to move after the brexit transition period, it would have been a lot more difficult and not really practical for us.
If we ever wanted to live outside of England, this was our chance. We took it.

Language school

I went to a language school for the first two and a half years of living in the Netherlands, before going to a Dutch high school.

Due to it being between lock downs when I moved I was already only really in touch with my friends online at the time. It was hard to leave all of my friends behind but it was also hard to find time to talk to them while so much needed to be done to move in such a short time.

Two weeks after arriving in the Netherlands me and my younger brother started at the language school. While all of the teachers could speak English (like nearly everybody in the Netherlands) they almost never did. We had to learn Dutch in Dutch. When I joined it was already part way through the school year but the highly individualised teaching strategy meant that this was not a problem.

In the language school there were people from all over the world, all united in our goal to learn Dutch. We only had three subjects; Dutch, maths, and gym.

I made many more friends there than in England. This was due in part to how the classes were divided, with all of the students changing each year. In England I had one class for all six years of primary school. People came and left but in general it was the same group of people. In the language school I changed class every year.
The final year of the language school was my favorite, my class was made up of some really amazing people.

In the Netherlands you get assigned a school type 'advies' based on your performance in standardised tests you take in your last school year and advise from your teachers. This 'advies' determines what kind of schools you can attend. These range from the highly practical focused education of vmbo (Preparatory secondary vocational education) to the highly theory focused vwo (Preparatory scientific education). I initially got a havo advies (between vmbo and vwo), but after some extra studying and retaking tests I was given a vwo advies.

High school

My high school type is vwo gymnasium. This is a type of school that focuses on both the sciences and the classics. In addition to the typical vwo subjects you also get Latin and Ancient Greek.

In stark contrast to the language school, my high school is very much a bubble of middle to upper class mostly white mostly Dutch people. This made it a lot harder for me to make friends for a while, with almost everyone fitting in to a culture I barely understood.

I didn't end up making many friends in the first two years of high school. Changing class so often in the language school had meant I was kind of tired of constantly having to make new friends. In addition to this, it was kind of hard to make friends with people in a class of people who were mostly two years younger than me and without any migration background. I was also not used to the freedom teenagers are given in the Netherlands and it was a lot to get used to.

High school in the Netherlands allows you to be very independent. For example my high school does not only lack uniform but also a dress code entirely. As long as you get to your lessons on time you are allowed to be anywhere outside the school buildings. If one of your teachers is not available for a lesson you can use that time to just go home, or to the shops, or wherever else you want. You are expected to be your own person and to question your teachers and authority figures.

I ended up 'coasting' through the first two years, trying to be as invisible as I could. Just before the start of the second year I began to realise that I was trans. It took several months to work up the courage to come out. After getting help from the zorgcoördinator at my school I came out officially at my school in the beginning of the third year. After that I felt a lot of relief and my grades and friendships became significantly more stable.

I ended up getting the chance to join the stage team and work on audio. I also joined the school play, where I finally felt like I got to meet people more like me. Lots of the people there were queer, migrants, and autistic. This is were I started to meet a lot of my friends.

Stage team

I was invited to the stage team in the first year of High school. At the time it was just me and one other person who had already been doing audio there for several years.
We are under the leadership of a one of the school's conciërges (in the Netherlands this is someone who handels the security of a building) who has a lot of experience with audio work and is very talented.
It turned out I was quite bad at audio and in the second year I switched to lighting. I invited another person from my class to take over learning audio. I vaguely knew them at the time and that they had attended the same language school as me a few years before I did. They are now one of my best friends.

I was the first person to take up lighting in three years (so since the pandemic). Unlike the lighting techs before me I did extensive online research and learned over the course of a few months to use all of the features of the lighting desk. This allowed me to make light shows filled with more colours, effects, and most importantly planning then my school had ever had before.

In the latter half of the second year the audio and lighting crews were each assigned two new members. This meant me and the person I invited to the audio team (the previous audio engineer now having graduated) had new team members to teach. After about a year of training I have taught the new people in the lighting team most of everything I know.

AutoQ

While planning light shows I had the problem of software. There was no president at my school for how to handle this kind of light show without being able to rely on preprogrammed millisecond accurite timings (our musicians are good but not that good). The first solution I came to was to add all of the lyrics for each song to a document in a word processor and denoting the position of each lighting cue relative to its closest line. After using LibreOffice writer for a while, it eventually became impractical due to it lacking some of the features I needed. The solution I came to was to design my own software tool specifically for this purpose: autoq. This software allowed our team to work a lot faster and make much more advanced light shows.

I built autoq in godot, which I had some prior experience with, but not much. I started by making a functional prototype. This showed me what we needed and what we didn't. It was also a complete mess.

I have been developing the main version ever since, it has all sorts of features, such as;

• saving and loading songs/plays
• saving/loading persistant settings
• generating the settings menu based on the json for the settings of the project
• updating and modifying the script to ensure all cue numbers are up to date
• a warning system for internal inconsistencies in the project that could cause problems
• accessibility settings for the interface
• fully integrated responsive ui
• and several more

I gave a talk on autoq at GodotCon 2026, the link to the youtube upload can be found here!
https://youtu.be/YDNkYs2POHc?si=lsVkHF05i51BzSCs

Transitioning

I have had an 'unusual' understanding of my gender for as long as I can remember. I never felt truly like a boy and eventually decided that I was just weird and that I could deal with that.
When my family was considering leaving England, we all had to agree. One of my reasons for agreeing which I didn't tell anyone at the time was that I felt like I needed to get away. My classmates knew a version of me I wasn't sure I wanted to be. I didn't even really know what was wrong, just that I had to run away and start again.
During language school I tried creating a newer personality. I learned how to suppress autistic meltdowns into shutdowns and tried to become more confident and independent.

That worked for a while. However, after the first year of high school I came to the rather sudden realisation that I might be trans. This was a logical continuation of my self discovery but it did come as quite a shock.

I can tell you the first day I back at school after that was probably one of the most terrifying I have ever had. I am not entirely sure what of exactly, I just felt scared.

The first person I came out to was one of my friends from the language school. He helped me a lot at the time despite not knowing that much about LGBTQ+ people at the time. I really just needed someone to talk to at the time and he was great at listening.

I came out to the leader of lighting team a few months later and he got me in contact with the zorgcoördinator at my school. She helped me to figure out how to handle coming out to my family and how transitioning worked both in the Netherlands and at my School.

In the beginning of the third year I officially transitioned in the eyes of my school. I was allowed to change my name and gender officially in the school's various online systems and my teachers were informed about a change in my names and pronouns.

All of my teachers have been at the very least not unsupportive, which has helped me feel safer at school. I have rarely experienced transphobia at school which I am very grateful for.

Transitioning has been a fairly gradual process for me. I have tried my best to handle it step by step and to not overwhelm myself. Overwhelming myself is not very hard given the difficulty of my school and my autism. I now do make up, dress more femininely and go to voice training. Due to very long waiting lists, being able to talk to a professional about transitioning and getting access to HRT looks like it is unfortunately still several years away...

Programming

My first experience with programming was with 'scratch' for school. Scratch is a block based programming web platform. You can also publish your games on their site and discover other people's games.
I loved it and used it a lot.
After going to high school I ended up using 'makecode arcade'. It's also a block based programming web platform. The difference is that it also allows you to convert your code between those blocks, python, and javascript.
I eventually ended up making a game so big the editor could not convert my code to the block based format, so I was kind of forced to learn python.
This ended up being quite a useful skill when I decided I wanted to start using some slightly more powerful software and switched to godot.

I have worked on a few projects in godot, some of my favorites being:

• a Keplerian orbital mechanics calculator space sim thing
• a space exploration sandbox game with a basic economy system and seed based world generation
• a tool called AutoQ for building light shows for the music nights at my school (also applicable for plays)

Web dev

I have done some web development in the past but this is the first website I have open to the internet. My dad is a web developer and he helped me a lot.
The first site I worked on was for music nights at my school to allow the audience to see the schedule and the currently playing song. I never finished it and it was lost due to inadequate backups and the wiping of an old device.

For this website I use the ruby on rails web framework and a SQLite database running on an ubuntu linux server.

Cycle touring

I began cycle touring with my family a few years before migrating to the Netherlands. Each year we would travel to the Netherlands and spend a few days touring the country by bike.

In our first cycle tours we slept in hotels but later on we moved to primarily tent camping. We try to take 1-2 days of break per 8 days, we will often go to a hotel in this time.

After moving to the Netherlands our tours started to get more ambitious. The last two cycle tours have been the most significant. In the cycle tour of 2024 we travelled across the Netherlands going about 300-350 kilometers. In our 2025 tour we travelled over 700 kilometers in 15 days from Maastricht in the Netherlands to Basil in Switzerland.

We are planning to do a tour from Umea to Nordkapp, the northernmost town reachable by road in Europe. We have never done touring somewhere so remote, but we are very exited. I will be adding articles for each day of the tour when we start in July.