rezonant

Twitter | LinkedIn | Email me, I'm wilahti on gmail.com | Want to support my work? I'm on Venmo

Hello! My name is Liam. I work at TYT in the daytime and am hacking away at my broadcast software startup Astronaut Labs in the night time hours. I am passionate about all things media, especially audio and video systems. I have over ten years of experience as a software engineer and have worked on projects in many domains like health care, printshops, SMS marketing, and of course, lots and lots of media, both on the consumer side as well as professional media production tooling.

I have been in the open source community for at least fifteen years, and have contributed code to a number of smaller projects, like Slicker (KDE Kicker replacement), SharpOS (a hobbyist OS written in C#). I have participated in community discussions in Mono (an open source .NET implementation), X.org, and KDE. I also have a number of open source projects that I'm actively developing today.

my politics

I am a politics junkie. I am unabashedly progressive. I participate in Democratic Socialists of America, I stand with Black Lives Matter, and I vote. I supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. As you can imagine, my work at TYT is very satisfying for me. Fun fact: I got to meet Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in person when she came on The Young Turks some time after she won her primary and before she won the general election in 2018!

my active projects

• @astronautlabs/diazo -- Diazo is a directed acyclical graph editor component for Angular in the style of Unreal Engine's Blueprint system. It can be used for lots of domains and use cases!
• @astronautlabs/scte104 -- As part of our work at Astronaut Labs I have built an open source implementation of the SCTE 104 client/server signaling protocol. As far as I know, it is the only open source implementation of SCTE 104 made for Node.js.
• alterior -- Alterior is an application framework that primarily facilitates Node.js server applications of all types. It uses a dependency injection system that is similar to Angular, and you can even create libraries that can be consumed both in Alterior apps (backend) and Angular (frontend) apps, making it isomorphic.
• razmin -- Razmin is a new take on the classic Jasmine/Mocha style test framework, but modernized to match Typescript conventions and using Zone.js to make testing asynchronous code simpler and more reliable.

my stack

Over the years I have honed my preferred toolset quite a lot. Find below a list of components that I use (in addition to my libraries above) for almost every project.

• Windows -- There was a time where I was not a fan of Windows, but through years of working with the Windows stack, especially .NET/C#, I have grown to appreciate its power. I use Windows for all of my desktop computing, and I do all of my development on Windows. I also have a good amount of experience administering enterprise Windows deployments including Windows Server (ActiveDirectory, Domains, SQL Server / IIS / ASP.NET)
• Linux -- Though I do my development on Windows, I deploy on Linux. I have been using Linux since circa 2003, and my first Linux distribution was Slackware, which I learned on my own as an angsty nerdy teenager. I have a deep understanding of Linux' architecture, having built experimental distributions based on Linux for fun.
• Firebase -- I believe the best path is to default to serverless architectures, and add tangible servers only when serverless cannot accomodate the use case. I have built a number of applications on Firebase and it is definitely the first tool I reach for when I look at hosting, database, and authentication for my apps.
• Google Cloud -- While I don't deploy VMs on Google Cloud, I found the cloud-native components that Google provides (like Cloud Messaging, PubSub, Cloud Functions, Kubernetes etc) perfectly complement Firebase, and often help me avoid spinning up a real persistent service in VMs or Containers. I still use Amazon and Azure at times, and for some projects I have used those clouds extensively, but I prefer Google Cloud when it makes sense.
• Typescript -- When I was introduced to Typescript with Angular 2, I fell in love. Fast forward to now (Angular 10 was just released) and I now use Typescript exclusively when building browser apps and Node.js services.
• Node.js -- I default to Node.js when building new server-side services, because I believe that the benefits of one language across frontend and backend is the most important consideration.
• Rust -- When Node.js isn't performant/low-level/etc enough, I reach for Rust.
• Angular -- I have been writing apps in Angular since Angular 2 beta (circa December 2015), and I was using AngularJS before that. I am enthusiastic and strongly invested in Angular as a platform, and I really love building apps with it
• Angular Material -- The Google Material Design implementation for Angular, Angular Material provides a rich suite of user interface controls that rarely leaves me wanting.
• Visual Studio Code -- I spend most of my day in front of VS Code and so should you!
• zone.js -- Zone.js is one of the most powerful libraries in my stack. A lot of the libraries I've built use it for one reason or another.

side projects

• sliptap -- Sliptap is a slick multi-source online media browser and player. Watch content from many video websites in a single place.
• streamatik -- Streamatik is a good looking Twitch multi-viewer.
• rezone -- I ❤️ zone.js, but I believe its API is difficult to use and somewhat overcomplicated. Zone.js also needs to become part of ECMAScript in order to continue working as new features like native async/await grow in usage, but standardization efforts have stalled for a number of reasons. Rezone aims to tackle both of these issues, creating a simpler, easier to use, and more intuitive API for zones, as well as proposes that its API become part of the ECMAScript standard, picking up where Domenic Denicola's Zones proposal left off