Intro
Hi, I'm Liam.
I've kept myself busy over the years. Aside from visual languages (Scratch, et al.), I wrote my first code at the age of 10. It was a simple address book in Java with display provided by the Swing toolkit. It was by no means a complicated application, but it gave me enough hands-on experience to satisfy my youthful curiosity for some time: a feeling that's stuck with me as I pushed on through the rest of my projects.
While I was still in elementary or early middle school and life was rife with time to spend on side projects, I wrote my first Chrome extension, built a Minecraft mod (why else would I have started with Java?), and wrote a Vagrant GUI control tool (before a plethora of them came to exist). It was around this time when I started what I would consider to be my first large-scale (at least by comparison) project, Collab.Center, a realtime collaborative coding editor. Sure, it was all PHP spaghetti code and the CSS was uglier than a monkey's armpit, but it did get me a tour of Firebase HQ (before they were bought by Google, heh) and more importantly gave me the experience of working on a larger project that was used around the world. I even made a few contributions to Firebase's GitHub repo, which made my 13 year old self nothing short of ecstatic when they were accepted.
Anyway, I include these projects because they were in a way the last of my hobby projects. My later, more serious work is included on the appropriately-named Work page. Some information about me personally is available on the About page, and lastly feel free to Contact me as well.
Work
For some time, I got involved in mobile app development using Apache's Cordova framework. One of the first applications I built with this was a library checkout system for my local Boy Scouts troop, which also used Firebase and served as my earliest introduction to Bootstrap. I also wrote a meeting room reservation app in a psuedo-internship for Veeva Systems. Lastly, I recieved my first taste of local fame with the Tri-Valley Buses app, which tracked the location of buses along their various routes with stop times. The data was returned directly from the organization's API, which I obtained by reverse engineering their website. I was pleasantly suprised when I learned of the coverage that it had recieved in local newspapers.
Past mobile development, I continued using Firebase in a new project, KingdomMaps, an interactive timeline of the world. The main vision at the time was being able to select any date and seeing the historical political borders for that time. I was greatly passionate about this project due to my love for history, but unfortunately its ambition proved to be its downfall. Nevertheless, after taking a year-long break from the project to do fullstack development using Django at Lend Technologies, Inc., I found myself getting in touch with others who shared similar ideals. From this, ChronoScio was born, development for which I continue to this day.
Many of these projects (as well as this website itself!) have used technologies such as JS/TS, React, Redux, and GraphQL on the frontend. On the backend, I'm quite comfortable with Django, Express, and am looking into Rust with the Rocket framework. I've also done a lot of GIS work, primarily with Mapbox. Web development aside, I've also worked with C#, Java, and Linux.
About
I like to think I do more than program. I'm active in my Boy Scouts Troop (have served as Senior Patrol Leader and am one requirement away from the Eagle rank) and love the outdoors. California is a great location for hiking, camping, backpacking, and all the rest. I'm also very passionate about the humanities; Dan Carlin's history podcasts are worth a solid reccomendation.
I tend to value giving back to others and the community as well as general open-mindedness. Of course, it's only natural to brush with the Free Software movement as a result. I generally chose the GPL for most of my projects and release the source for as much as I reasonably can. I've spent my share of time with the Tri-Valley CoderDojo, especially in its early stages, but found myself spending less time as the organization grew. I've been involved with clubs at my school, such as the Cybersecurity club and the Computer Science Association to provide instruction for my peers; which presents a persistent challenge in the constantly-evolving technical climate of today.
Contact