Software Engineer | Roboticist | AI | Musician | Photographer
I am a graduate from Christopher Newport University with a B.S. ('16) and M.S. ('18) (Thesis) in Computer Science. I create products that users want and enjoy using. I make other developers more effective by supporting DevOps in an organization. I solve business problems using proper software engineering principles. I also implement these principles in an organization. Personally, I am a believer in the Agile methodology and is something I like to bring to organizations. I contribute to open source when possible.
For whatever reason, I decided to write a thesis in a field that I had zero experience in. My thesis has to be the most challenging thing I have done to date. Because of this thesis, I now understand robotics better as well as the tools and frameworks that roboticists use to create applications.
I have worked as a full stack developer, software engineer, graduate lab assistant, tutor, and tech camp instructor across eight years. I enjoy learning exciting and relevant technologies, and automation processes. Thanks to my Master's Thesis, I learned that I enjoy robotics and AI, at least from a software perspective. Additionally, I had to learn ROS (Robot Operating System) in order to fully implement my Thesis.
I have been in a few bands over the years, playing drums or bass. The most recent band I was in is DOWNHAUL. They are an excellent group of guys that make killer indie rock/emo music, if that's your thing. On the other side of creativity, I enjoy photography and creating interesting shots. I currently use a Nikon D3300 with 35mm, 18-55mm, and 55-300mm lenses. Some of my shots can be seen on Flickr.
One day I'd like to own and run a record label. I spend way too much time listening and curating music, so the idea makes sense after getting more business experience.
My most recent project is a NPM package called auto-lighthouse. I needed to audit many different web pages under a certain domain, but didn't have a straightforward way to accomplish this goal. This is where auto-lighthouse comes into play. It allows me to crawl a web domain, generate, and view the resulting Google Lighthouse reports. Since Lighthouse uses axe under the hood, I avoid second guessing the results of the accessibility audit. As a bonus, I get all the other metrics from the Lighthouse report as well!
The gist, there was a fundamental bug in Team ViGIR's open-source footstep planner that I fixed. Because of this fix, the planner performs as expected and generates footstep plans in an appropriate amount of time. Additionally, my thesis advisor and I discovered other issues in the planner that, when solved, will contribute a significant amount of progress to the current open-source implementation.
The gist, create an academic gatekeeping application using physics papers. In detail, I wanted to create a data visualization project using D3js as the main tool. I ended up using JavaScript, Java, PHP, MySQL, Bootstrap3, and D3js to create the entire project. The end result is a force-directed graph that shows citation relationships between papers. This allows a user to visually see which papers are important in a citation network.
Feel free to email me at tim@tgiles.dev for more information, or if I seem like a good fit for your organization.