Hi, I’m Joseph.

I’m a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo, double majoring in computer science and pure mathematics. Welcome to my small slice of the web :) Here, I write about math, programming, and other things that happen to pique my interest. In addition to longer-form blogs, I also post shorter notes and links to pieces I liked on the tidbits page.

If you would like to know more about me or my projects, head over to my about page. To contact me, email me at jliu1602 [at] gmail.com; I am also active on Discord as jo3_l.

Bitap: my favorite string matching algorithm

An exposition of the bitap or shift-and exact string matching algorithm

07 September 2026 · 1809 words · Joseph Liu

Summer '26 in the Big Apple

Reminiscing about my summer in NYC interning at Bloomberg

24 August 2026 · 1688 words · Joseph Liu

Perspectives on LLM-assisted development

Articles and posts about LLM-assisted development that I found interesting and are not slop, plus some of my opinions

14 July 2026 · 1995 words · Joseph Liu

A puzzling Python program

Counting down, seemingly without loops or recursion

08 August 2025 · 686 words · Joseph Liu

Property-based testing is magical

Tests that expose gaps in your thinking instead of confirming what you already know

11 August 2024 · 1811 words · Joseph Liu