Hi,

I'm a person.

I am currently in my freshman year of college at the University of Pittsburgh, where I plan to study computer science. In my free time, I mostly make Android stuff and websites, but also have a bit of interest in graphic design. Nearly everything that I make is open source under some form of license (my preference is the Apache 2.0), and I usually accept pull requests on all of my projects unless stated otherwise. My resume can be downloaded here.

You can see all of my latest blog posts here.

You can also find a few pictures that I have taken, published under the Creative Commons License, here.

Find me in places.

See my work.

You can find most of my projects here on this site, but I have also worked on a few for some organizations:

DoubleDotLabs We do developer things. NervOS Operating System by Double Dot Labs. Based on CyanogenMod 14.

These are my blogs. I usually talk about why I make certain projects, what they are supposed to do, and how they supposedly accomplish it. I do not post often, as it takes quite a while to write these posts, but you can subscribe for updates through Feedburner.

The Blogs

Continuous Integration with Travis CI for Android November 14 2018
An in-depth tutorial explaining how to set up Travis CI to deploy signed builds to Google Play. Among other things. CSS Submodules October 26 2018
How I organize my site's CSS and why. Exceptional Traveler September 25 2018
I explain how and why (sort of) I wrote an implementation of the Traveling Salesperson Problem using Exceptional Programming standards. Pricing Models September 17 2018
TL;DR - Don't work for free. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH September 1 2018
A small command-line utility I wrote with Go that I had a lot of fun with. Client-Side JavaScript August 19 2018
Why I rewrote my site with Jekyll, rather than running a ton of client-side JavaScript that doesn't really work all of the time. Attribouter August 17 2018
A short breakdown of a really really big library I wrote to credit contributors and libraries used in my Android projects. Hello World July 28 2018
I made a blog. GIVE ME FEATURE OR 1★ December 21 2016
The Person Behind the Screen has feelings too. And they hurt.

Open Source

I have a strong distaste for projects that purposefully attempt to hide the way that they function from their users. There are many reasons to justify this distaste, but things such as Dark Patterns, Cryptojacking, or even old-school keyloggers stand out as the most offensive. To oppose this, I strive to make all of my projects accessible to the public so that it is possible for anyone to not only see how they are built, but also contribute to their development and benefit from their existence in other ways than just using the product. Nearly every one of my projects is published under some form of Open Source license, and I try to accept every pull request that is created (or at least provide some helpful criticism so that not all effort is wasted if it is not merged).

If you have a question about any of my projects, posts, or... really anything, I can be contacted through many of the "places" listed in /home, emailed at [email protected], or cord...ed (?) in the Discord channel below.

The Community

While I have come far since I first started, I did not gain this much knowledge by myself; many people, one way or another, have helped me to solve problems and learn new things along the way.

If you find my projects interesting and want to see more, it is definitely worth the time to check out some of their work!

Alex Dueppen I make cool stuff sometimes Aidan Follestad 23. SDX/Android Software Engineer @square. Full stack programmer (Android, web, backend). Motorcycle rider. PC/PS4 Gamer. Rock/metal music. Akshath Jain Android Developer. AI Creator. Avid Netflix Watcher. Alexandre Piveteau Student in CS @ETHZ. Consulting @milkinteractive. Alex Lionne This is a person. Andrew Quebe Android/Web Developer | Freshman at IVC | Passionate about everything Tech | Occasional Photographer Aniket Bhattacharyea 2nd year Mathematics Hons. sure This is a person. Chiu-Ki Chan This is a person. Charles Lee This is a person. codebleu13 This is a person. CrazeeAdil This is a person. Corbin Crutchley Kinda like the man in the yellow hat; only without a hat, or monkey, or really any other resemblance to the man. Daniel Hickman Telegram: https://t.me/danielhickman Darin Menezes Human peter soboyejo 18 ~ I like cars and books. Jeremy Jao This is a person. Erik Boesen GMHS '19. President & Programming Captain of @frc1418. Summer Research Assistant at MIT Marine Autonomy Lab. Heinrich Reimer Passionate Android developer. Héctor de Isidro Android @ LolaMarket • Ikey Doherty Hippy At The Helm @ Solus Jackson Hayes Cinematographer & Web Developer // http://jacksonhayes.xyz // [email protected] Jahir Fiquitiva Colombian 🇨🇴 Passionate + Creative Freelance Developer 👨🏻‍💻 Jake Wharton This is a person. Jan-Lukas Else Student, Developer & Blogger Jonas Drotleff I and me are always too deep in conversation. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche Justin Kruit This is a person. Kosh Sergani I'm a Networking by education & Android developer by choice. Karim Abou Zeid This is a person. Kartik Arora Developer | Drummer | Tech Geek | F1 Enthusiast Kutsan Kaplan This is a person. lyra messier This is a person. Pierre de la Martinière JS developer @ginetta and street photographer. Stupid and arrogant french in my spare time. Matthias Android engineer at adesso mobile solutions. Developer of Imagine for Instagram. Maximilian Keppeler This is a person. 丹ㄥモメ Some days I solve problems, other days I make them mcburton This is a person. Mike Penz This is a person. Sasi Kanth Mobile developer | Android & iOS Marlon Jones Artist/Programmer. Co-Founder of @doubledotlabs, and UAB CS/Art Studio student. Twitter, Dribbble, and Artstation: @pancodemakes Patrick Jung Linux, Android and Open-Source enthusiast. RKBDI This is a person. Riccardo Busetti A meticulous guy into software development who aims to write state of the art code to solve real life problems. Rick Clephas This is a person. Saket Narayan A wild developer appeared. silverword This is a person. Thanos Psaridis (Fisherman) This is a person. Chris Bravata This is a person. TheGrayWolf81 This is a person. Tigran Hakobyan Creator of cronhub.io. Software engineer @bufferapp. Previously at @twitter. Tijmen Ennik This is a person. Tim Bremer Mostly on GitLab > https://gitlab.com/timbremer TWellington This is a person. Philippe Loctaux sleep eat code repeat, student at epitech Zac Littleberry I focus on nonprofit, opensource, web based software and develop on Linux. Available for DM on twitter. No mass solicitation pls. Adrien This is a person. Vukašin Anđelković Freelance graphic designer doing creative work on the internet. Creator of CandyCons and PixBit icon packs.

Me, myself, and I

I have always been interested in technology for as long as I can remember. I still have vague memories of watching videos of the humanoid Honda ASIMO robot in awe, back when I was in elementary school, wondering how it worked. I tried to attend a few classes on "coding", but I didn't gain as much from them as I would have liked, mainly because... I can't think of any other way to say this... they were boring. So many programs exist to try and teach middle schools to use scratch or python, claiming that "coding is easy!", and "anyone can write code!", but they couldn't be further from the truth. Following instructions to make a program that says "Hello World" is easy, but it doesn't teach you anything and doesn't provide any form of an interesting result. Now, I'm not saying that all programming classes are fundamentally flawed - there are quite a few that I have since attended that were quite informative - but nothing like that was available to me at the time. The problem with following instructions when you first start programming is that there are no problems. Since you're following instructions that have already been tried and tested, you know that everything will work properly. There is no design process - testing, problem solving, and finding solutions are all skipped over. So while I did know the basics of python in middle school, I didn't make anything with it. It seemed pointless to me.

I got my first Android device (The Great Samsung Galaxy S2) when I was 13, and started making my first app on it a little over a year later. Because I was a lazy idiot, my first few projects consisted entirely of a WebView linked to a Google Sites page, but I quickly realized the limitations of this method. During the summer break of 2015, I spent hours every day scouring Stack Overflow for examples of how make an android app perform various tasks. This was especially difficult as I had no prior knowledge of the Java language and I'm pretty sure that I didn't even know I was writing Java for the first couple months. My first project was a basic app that took a paragraph as input, and make it 'bigger' by replacing words with longer phrases and/or doubling the amount of spaces between words and sentences in the document. It wasn't long after I finished this that I got my Google Play account and started working on a new app to display a collection of wallpapers made by people I had met on Google Plus.

That app has since been unpublished because it was a complete abomination with the worst code style I have ever seen in my life, and is currently collecting dust at the bottom of my GitHub profile. While making it, however, I managed to improve the app's UX a great deal and learnt a lot about consumer-focused design, making the app's functionality both easy for new users to understand and fast enough for existing users to navigate without feeling like they're wasting time.

Well, that's about all I can think of for an informal description of myself. Ever since I learnt to make Android apps, I've been bouncing around between lots of different types of projects. Some are intended for regular consumers, some for people obsessed with customization, and even a few for other developers like me.

I am currently in my freshman year of college at the University of Pittsburgh trying to figure out what on earth I want to do with my life. That said, I'm still hopelessly addicted to programming, and will keep making anything and everything I can think of in my free time.