Welcome to the Heretical Camelid Website
About this website
This site, and the heretical-camelid.net domain belong to me, Tim Littlefair.
I am a software engineer with more than 30 years of industry experience, and before that hobbyist interest in computers going all the way back to my schooldays in the mid-1970s.
I use this site to promote and host my personal software projects (most but not all released as open source).
My interests
Within the software engineering domain, I am most interested in the following topics:
minimalism - no-code and low-code system delivery;
metrics of code and the processes of working on it;
coding styles and coding standards;
computer languages - their evolution and the culture and communities associated with them;
reverse engineering serial/USB/wireless protocol devices to extend their useful lives beyond the lifetime/functionality provided by first party vendor control software;
security and privacy; and
the use of technology to do useful things in society without regard for profit (without any intended disrepect for profit-oriented technology uses).
I consider myself an ‘agile practitioner’, but I do not have a blind faith in ‘agile’ in general or any specific sect within the ‘agile community’.
Some time ago (perhaps starting around the year 2000), it wasn’t uncommon to see software industry job titles with the word ‘evangelist’ in them. As I have a naturally skeptical frame of mind, whenever I think of that title it makes me think that I would be interested in working for a company who were were prepared to advertise for a ‘heretic’ with an explicit brief to think about and experiment with controversial/dangerous/contrarian ideas and practices to see if there are any babies in the bathwater.
Linux has its penguin, Github has its kitten (is the icon supposed to be it a kitten?) and Ubuntu has (by my reckoning, as at September 2025) a menagerie covering about the whole alphabet about 1.6 times. I live in Western Australia, where Alpacas are farmed, and I think that they are delightful animals, so I have selected the Camelid (Alpaca/Llama import sphinx.ext family) as the spirit animal presiding over my web presence.
Some of my projects
Name |
Project Description |
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Android, Linux/macOS, web application which explores the capabilities of a number of modelling guitar amplifier hardware products manufactured by the Fender Musical Instrument Corporation under the brand umbrella ‘Fender Mustang’. Specifically, at the moment, the codebase is tested against the ‘Fender Mustang LT40S’ model, may work with other models in the ‘LT’ series, and contains some preliminary scripts and documents related to adding capability to work on the ‘Mustang Micro Plus’ model. |
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An android application which simulates the process of accepting a contactless EMV payment at a transit (bus, train, metro, ferry) payment validator. The purpose of this application is to enable capture of technical data useful to diagnose payment acceptance issues related to specific issuers payment cards or wallet applications, particularly when the subject matter experts responsible for investigation are not able to come to the host location where payments need to be accepted. |
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Command line utility to process the output of a ‘git log’ or ‘svn log’ command and produce an estimate of the coding time invested in the commits listed in the log. |
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(Tim Littlefair’s Web Application Serverless Transition Environment) |
A framework and command line tool to build a serverless web application in AWS using the Route 53, API Gateway, Lambda and S3 services. My personal website (i.e. the one you are reading now) is deployed using the tl-waste framework. |
A single page HTML/Javascript password generator (designed to be printed out as an offline source of random passwords based on the Base64 character set). |
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(C and C++ Code Counter) |
Command line utility to parse ANSI C, C++ and Java code and report a number of metrics including lines of code, lines of comment, McCabe’s cyclomatic complexity. This utility was implemented over the period 1992-2003 originally as part of my PhD research project. A version of this has been included in the Debian/Ubuntu/etc family of Linux distributions up to and including Debian 13/Trixie and its derivatives. |
How to contact me
Software industry practitioners with comparable interests can contact me via my profiles on the following sites:
I am semi-retired, but open to taking on short- to medium- term consultancy/contract jobs in my areas of expertise either with teams in my local market (Perth, Western Australia) or remotely subject to the following qualifications:
I am only interested in opportunities where I would be working alongside an ongoing team, with an agreed objective for completing my engagement and handing ongoing support responsibility for the work done over to the employer’s team; and
I am not interested in being represented by a recruiter or agency and will only consider direct approaches (preferably via LinkedIn) by a person with an engineering/technical role in the principal business who directly employs the team I am being approached to assist.