About Me

Hi! I’m Joseph Liu, a computer science student from Canada. Starting Fall 2024, I’ll be studying at the University of Waterloo; before that, I graduated from the IB Diploma program in the May 2024 session with 45/45 points.

I love to program in my free time, and have built and contributed to various projects over the years—more on those below. Besides programming, I also enjoy reading, writing, playing tennis, and the occasional anime/manga; my favorite anime this year was Frieren.

Programming experience and projects

Nowadays, I primarily work with Rust and Go on backend projects; however, I also have experience in Python, TypeScript, Java, and C++ among other technologies.

I am a longtime contributor to the open-source YAGPDB Discord bot in Go, focusing on improving its custom templating engine. Notably, I implemented multiple language features such as loop control flow actions (break, continue) and error-handling constructs, and am currently working on a language server in Rust using tower-lsp. Some highlights from the latter project include an error-tolerant and lossless parser outputting a CST with rowan and scope resolution.

Some of my other projects include:

• obscenity: A robust profanity detection library for Node.js written in TypeScript. It implements an extensible transformer-based design and is thoroughly tested with Vitest and fast-check. Obscenity is used by hundreds of open-source projects, and has been downloaded 700k+ times total on npm.
• markpdf: A command-line utility to edit PDF bookmarks using a convenient indentation-based format, built in Go.
• liftoff: An interpreter for a toy programming language, built with Python. Though basic, the language is sufficiently complete to build some interesting programs.
• yagpdb-cc: A community collection of custom commands for YAGPDB. I created and continue to maintain this project, having reviewed submissions from 30+ contributors over the years. I’ve also built some supporting automation which has seen use in other YAGPDB-related projects.
• vsHacks: In high school, I co-founded vsHacks, a now-annual hackathon organized by my programming club in collaboration with other high schools across Greater Vancouver. I led work on the hackathon website and helped run workshops during the event, which saw 50+ participants from the district and beyond.

For a complete list, see my GitHub repositories.¹

Contact

I’m always happy to chat! Please email me at jliu1602 [at] gmail.com or send me a direct message on Discord (username jo3_l.)