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 25 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). In the near future I hope to add some writing as well.
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;
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 see that title it makes me think that I would be very 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 February 2021) a menagerie covering about the whole alphabet about 1.3 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 family) as the spirit animal presiding over my web presence.
Hence the domain name of this site.
Some of my projects¶
Name |
Project Description |
|---|---|
|
(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. |
Trailer |
Multiple mobile and web applications associated with the idea of having map-based bookmarks on a mobile device. |
vceffort |
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. |
tl-waste (Tim Littlefair’s Web Application Serverless Transition Environment) |
A framework and command line tool to build a serverless web application in AWS using the API Gateway, Lambda and S3 services. |
pwgen.html |
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). |
lqatable |
A script used to perform link quality analysis for a network of legacy data communication devices (written for a friend doing consultancy work for a government department owning the devices and needing to know whether the network is still viable as a fallback if more modern networks are down). |
photo-tweaks |
A script to fix up incomplete panorama photos captured on a Nikon AW110 digital camera |
Hosted examples¶
My personal website¶
… (i.e. the one you are reading now) is deployed using the tl-waste framework