Tim Giles
Software Engineer | Roboticist | AI | Musician | Photographer
About Me
I am a graduate from Christopher Newport University with a B.S. ('16) and M.S. ('18) 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 organizations. Personally, I am a believer in the Agile methodology. It is something I like to bring to organizations. Additionally, I contribute to open source when possible.
For whatever reason, I decided to write a thesis in a field that I had no experience in. My thesis was the most challenging thing I have done to date. Because of this thesis, I understand robotics better. I also understand the tools and frameworks, such as ROS that roboticists use to create applications.
I've worked as a front-end developer, full stack developer, software engineer, graduate lab assistant, tutor, and tech camp instructor across ten years. I enjoy learning exciting and relevant technologies, and automation processes. Thanks to my thesis, I've learned that I enjoy robotics and AI...at least from a software perspective.
I've 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 great music. They're hard to characterize, but I'd say some blend of country/indie/emo is my way of looking at them. On the other side of creativity, I enjoy photography and capturing everyday moments. I'm currently trying to find a point and shoot camera that I like, so that I can focus less on zooming and more on composing...but haven't decided on anything yet.
I think one day I'd like to run a record label. I spent way too much time listening and analyzing music, so maybe that's a way to expand myself.
Featured Projects
auto-lighthouse
My most recent project is a NPM package called auto-lighthouse. My motivation for creating this package was, I needed to audit many different web pages under a certain domain but didn't have an easy way to accomplish this. There were some similar projects, but they were unmaintained and I was unable to get them to work. This is where auto-lighthouse comes into play. It allows me to crawl a web domain, generate reports, 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!
Master's Thesis
For my thesis, I wanted to use Team ViGIR's open-source footstep planner to create paths for a small humanoid robot. Their footstep planner was originally designed for a human-sized (~6ft, ~1.8m) humanoid robot, not a small (~1.5ft, ~0.45m) humanoid robot in our lab. Part of my research was solving this scaling issue so that the path planner would give accurate paths 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 implementation.
Undergraduate Capstone
For my undergraduate capstone, I created an academic gatekeeping application using physics papers. I wanted to learn more about data visualization technologies and thus used D3.js as the main tool. The stack for the application consisted of JavaScript, Java, PHP, MySQL, Bootstrap 3, and D3.js. The outcome of my capstone 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.
Contact Me
Feel free to email me at tim@tgiles.dev for more information or if I'm a good fit for your organization!