I’m Tim Stewart. I got my B.S. in Computer Science last year, and I’m currently looking for work as a junior software engineer.

Portfolio

  • Timbo’s “Hacker News” Reader (thnr.net, about page, GH repo) is my current showcase project. The backend ingests story feeds from the well-known Hacker News via API and uses Selenium and requests to surface additional metadata (such as a thumbnail image, the name of the article’s author, and the article’s estimated reading time) from the linked articles. The program is multithreaded to process articles and pages in parallel using concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor.
    Tech stack: Python, Selenium and chromedriver, Beautiful Soup, requests, boto3 (AWS S3), wand (ImageMagick binding).

  • Hayfevr.ly (blog post, repo to come) scrapes the web pages of six local allergy clinics and news stations for pollen count data using Selenium.
    Tech stack: Python, Selenium and chromedriver, Beautiful Soup, requests, boto3 (AWS S3), Python-tesseract (pytesseract), MySQL.

  • Demo URL shortener using FastAPI (blog post, GH repo). This REST API also provides a secret administrative key that can be used to check stats on the short URL’s usage and delete the short code if desired.
    Tech stack: Python, FastAPI, SlowApi (rate limiter), SQLite3.

  • One of my two favorite projects for my CS degree was a vehicle-routing problem (VRP) (GH repo, term paper). (My term paper explaining how I solved the problem is in the repo too.)
    Tech stack: Python.

  • My other favorite project used machine learning on thousands of Wikipedia articles and made the results searchable using point clouds as well as a trie-based search feature (GH repo, term paper). (My term paper explaining how I developed the project is in the repo too.)
    Tech stack: Python, keras, matplotlib, numpy, pandas.

Technical Skills

  • Languages: bash, Java, JavaScript, MySQL, Python
  • AWS, Django, DRF, FastAPI, Flask, git, regex, Selenium

Soft Skills

  • Excellent written and oral communication skills and interpersonal skills
  • Technically curious and a fast learner
  • Very good at working with stakeholders to elicit needs, manage expectations, maintain relationships
  • Committed and conscientious worker; team player

Education

B.S. Computer Science, Western Governors University, 2022

Certifications

AWS CLF-C01 (Cloud Computing Practitioner), expires 12/5/2025.
(Validation code: TTN4JWJ1QBR4QGSH)

Relevant Work Experience

BrightLeaf Group (consulting agency)
Technical Editor. July 2022–present. (part-time contract)

  • Edit highly technical 200-page ISO-compliant technology standards and microchip specifications for grammar, clarity, bias, and technical precision.
  • Consistently meet tight deadlines while exceeding customers’ expectations.
  • Use industry-standard tools such as git, GitHub Actions, Travis CI, bash scripts, Subversion, Markdown, pandoc, Prince XML.

O’Reilly Media (well-known tech book publisher).
Proofreader. December 2022–June 2023. (part-time contract)

  • Proofread and edited upcoming technology books for grammar, clarity, tone, bias, and adherence to publisher’s formatting standards.
  • Key titles for which I am credited as proofreader include: PHP Cookbook by Eric A. Mann (2023) ISBN 978-1098121327; The Enterprise Data Catalog by Ole Olesen-Bagneux (2023) ISBN 978-1492098713; Practical Linux System Administration by Ken Hess (2023) ISBN 978-1098109035.

Recent Accomplishments

In 2022, while working with the MySQL “Sakila” sample database for one of my courses, I discovered two bugs in the database’s data (#106951, #107158) that were reported and fixed in time for the MySQL 8.0.31 release.

  • For bug #106951, I discovered that all the extended character set letters (such as á, â, ç, é, İ, í, ñ, ó, ö, š) were missing from the city names in the city table, likely due to an encoding error at some point in the past. The city in Spain called ‘A Coruña (La Coruña)’ had become ‘A Corua (La Corua)’ (missing ñ). In all, 62 of the 600 names in the city table were missing their accented letters. I discovered the bug while using the pytz Python package to compute time zone offsets for the cities in city. pytz failed on some cities, and when I looked up those cities on a map, I saw the spelling discrepancy.
  • For bug #107158, I discovered that five of the payment records in payment had null values for their rental_id foreign-key field. This meant that querying the payment table to find the sum of rental payments gave a sum $9.95 greater than if you queried the rental transactions table with a JOIN on rental_id to the payment table. (MySQL accepted my proposed solution to simply delete those five records.)
  • Hilariously, in summer 2023 while refreshing my memory on the details of the previous two Sakila bugs by perusing the Sakila files, I found and promptly reported a 3rd bug (#112552), which was fixed in time for Sakila’s version 1.5 release.

Professional Memberships and Service

Dictionary Society of North America (DSNA)

TeX User Group (TUG)

  • Have created the torrent and been the initial seeder for the TeXLive ISO every year since 2019