William Connatser

Full Stack Engineering

About Me

I've always been interested in computers and technology ever since I was a teenager. I earned a CompTIA A+ certification when I was 16, and took two years of programming courses where I was introduced to Java and C++. However life had different plans for me, and immediately after high school I secured a great job doing Mineral Title Research in the Oil & Gas industry.

Fourteen years later, I had an epiphany that I've never really loved any of my previous jobs. They were simply a tool that I used in order to make money. I liked various aspects of each job, but I couldn't say that I liked doing the actual jobs themselves. I understand that it sounds corny, but finally I understood the phrase "if you love what you do, then you never work a day in your life".

So I spent two years working full time while learning how to program during my spare time. I learned using Udemy, online tutorials, and by working on a couple of complex full-stack web applications I built from scratch. Since June of 2018, I have been focusing on web development as a profession full-time. In addition to contract work, in February of 2019 I enrolled in Lambda School to sharpen my skills so that I could focus on becoming the best software engineer I can be. Since January of 2020, I have been employed as a full-stack developer specializing in JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.JS, and SQL stack.

Skills

Portfolio

Citadel Bitcoin Node

TYPESCRIPT PYTHON NEXT.JS TAILWIND CSS DOCKER BITCOIN LIGHTNING NETWORK

Code

Citadel is FOSS plug-and-play self-hosted Bitcoin and Bitcoin Lightning Network node. Third party applications can easily be installed from an internal App Store which have the ability to communicate with the Bitcoin and Lightning Network nodes. The App Store expand functionality greatly by providing third party utilities, dashboards, and additional self-hosted software. The use cases are limited only by developer's creativity, but currently include self-hosted cloud backups, email servers, git servers, and many more use cases unrelated to Bitcoin.

PG Toolbox

NODE.JS POSTGRES BABEL NPM PACKAGE DEVELOPMENT

NPM Package Code

PG Toolbox is an NPM package containing a suite of CLI utility scripts which assists programmers manage Postgres databases by providing a pattern to define, organize, and execute migration, rollback, truncate and seeding scripts. It was created as an alternative to the database management features of knex (and other ORMs) in order to promote writing pure SQL. I assert that dynamic query builders like knex (and other ORMs) are overkill for most use cases, and I wanted to provide a useful tool which can be leveraged to learn SQL in a project based setting.

Adams-League Historic Inn

HTML CSS MATERIAL UI JAVASCRIPT REACT NEXT.JS TWILIO SENDGRID NEXT.JS VERCEL SERVERLESS FUNCTIONS POSTGRES

Live Site

Adams-League Historic Inn is the premiere destination for your stay on Galveston Island. Built on top of Next.JS for optimal search engine optimization, I was contracted to build this project in a few months while working on it part-time. It features numerous pages which highlight various aspects of why this historic mansion is so special. When a user submits the Contact Us form which is secured from spam with Google Re-Captcha, both parties are automatically notified by email via a Twilio SendGrid API integration.

Maze MUD Escape

HTML CSS JAVASCRIPT REACT WEBWORKERS HTML5 CANVAS PYTHON DJANGO POSTGRES WEBSOCKETS

Live Site Code

Maze MUD Escape is a multiplayer and interactive maze escape game which was made in only a few days for a Lambda School project. We were tasked to build out our backend using the Python framework Django, which we had never used before. Learning how to learn is one of the core tenants of Lambda School's curriculum. Web Workers were leveraged for non-blocking rendering of the game on an HTML5 canvas, and Web Sockets were utilized in several ways to enhance the multi-player game experience.

ChallengeJS

HTML CSS JAVASCRIPT REACT WEBWORKERS NODE EXPRESS POSTGRES AUTH0

Live Site Code

ChallengeJS is a JavaScript code challenge web site which was built in just one month for a Lambda School project. Running and validating arbitrary code which is written client-side proved to be a nice challenge. Not only could the code be malicious, but it could also have errors and/or stack overflows. We ended up leveraging Web Workers in order to run the code client-side, and if the code errored (or timed) out, then our application would not come crashing to a halt.

Stockly

HTML CSS REACT JAVASCRIPT NODE EXPRESS POSTGRES

Live Site Code

Stockly helps you make informative decisions as to whether you should buy, sell or hold equities based off of analysis from a machine learning model. Save stocks to your favorites, or view recent values and price movements. This project was built in only a few days with a small group of Lambda School students. I was solely responsible for the backend of this project. One of the engineering challenges I faced was dealing with rate limit issues with the AlphaVantage API, so I created a database table to cache price data to reduce API calls.

Bitcoin Maximalism

HTML CSS JAVASCRIPT VUE BTCPAY NODE GRAPHQL MONGODB

Live Site Code

Bitcoin Maximalism is an educational and social website which helps users explore the nuance surrounding different Bitcoin and cryptocurrency investment theses. Users can donate Bitcoin via Mainnet and/or Lightning Network transactions which boosts their the weighting of their up-votes and down-votes. Depending on the faction they choose, they can decide which group receives the lionshare of the donations.
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