Joshua Liu
Welcome To My Portfolio!
Rather than repeating my resume, this page offers additional information and insights for you to get to know more about me.
About Me
Hi! I’m Josh, a student studying computer science at Duke University. After looking into many different fields, I’ve discovered that software engineering is the field I want to pursue. No matter what I do, my goal is the same: to help the world one line of code at a time.
Fun Facts
- I enjoy competitive swimming and training mixed martial arts.
- When I was considering the premed route, I became a licensed EMT.
- I love learning party tricks such as juggling and solving the Rubik’s cube.
Contacts
Phone Number: 484-758-7935
Personal Email: liu.joshua555@gmail.com School Email: joshua.liu@duke.edu
Links
Education
Duke University
Clubs:
- Social Media Chair for the Roundtable SLG
- Club Swimming
- Club Pickleball
Ravenwood High School
Clubs:
- Team Captain of Club Swim
- Consul of Junior Classical League
- Science Bowl
Experience
Trio Labs
Trio Labs is a company that 3D prints micro parts for multiple different industries. Although the company consists of roughly 50 employees, the software engineering team consists of 6 people as well.
What I’ve Done:
- Participated in weekly SWE review meetings
- Receive weekly lectures about a multitude of computer science and electrical and computer engineering topics
- Monthly one-on-one check-ins with the lead senior developer
MyGymBuddy
MyGymBuddy is an app that allows gym goers to find gym buddies to exercise with. We are a small, remote team of 6 based in Indiana, Colorado, and Tennessee. The public beta is launching in Indiana on June 21st, with New York City following soon.
What I’ve Done:
- Participated in weekly SCRUM meetings to discuss progress and plans with the team
- Learned how tech affects the business side of things
- Interviewed prospective candidates and helped onboard them
Duke Applied Machine Learning Club
DAML is a club at Duke University that works on hardware, data science, AI / ML, and software projects. I was a team member on an event planning project that was meant to replace Duke Groups.
What I did:
- Integrated PayPal API to allow users to pay for tickets
- Implemented a login / logout system using JWT
Helping Hands Corporation
Helping Hands Corporation is a nonprofit that focuses on education and elder care. I was a team member working on a website for Arizona State University that allows students and professors to coordinate on research.
What I did:
- Deployed the backend of the website to AWS EC2
- Created a file uploading system
Tennessee State Government
What I did:
- Wrote a script that parsed through thousands of lines, reducing the need for manual data entry
Projects
Real Life Among Us
As mentioned above, I’m part of the Duke Roundtable SLG, which is a social club. We play a popular game called “BioSci Assassins,” which is where turn off all the lights in the biological sciences buiding and play a real life version of Among Us. However, the game is played manually, with cards, GroupMe, and a whole lot of shouting. I made this to automate the game and introduce the concept of tasks, similar to the real game.
Competitive Programming Stress Tester
I used to be a competitive programmer, and I often spent ages banging my head against the wall trying to see why my solution was failing on some random, hidden test case. I wanted to create a tool that allowed Java users (although I used C++) to stress test their solutions against randomly generated test cases.
Pixel Art Maker
This was my first project that took around two weeks of constant coding. The purpose was to work on my OOP fundamentals. The inspiration came from a Tech With Tim video where he made a Microsoft Paint clone.
Stupid Superpowers
One day, two of my friends asked me if I wanted to make a spinoff of “Cards Against Humanity.” Of course, I agreed, and we made 200 cards while I soloed the webapp. After around 3 months of coding (restarted the entire project from scratch once), we demoed both the physical and digital version. I even wrote my college essay about this, which I firmly believe was a pivotal reason as to why I got into Duke.
Find A Swim
As a competitive swimmer, I often had trouble finding workouts outside of practice, so I decided to make a database that allows users to create and share workouts.
Strategy Steps
I used to play a lot of Wii as a kid, and one of my favorite minigames from Wii Party was Strategy Steps. It involves 4 players each picking either 1, 3, or 5. Whoever, gets picks a unique number moves up X amount of steps. The first player to 10 steps wins. I was in a Discord friend group, and I decided to make a little bot that could simulate this game, so we would have something to do while talking.
Simulators
These are all written in Pygame
This was for a Latin class, where we had to make a project about a Greek myth. I chose Theseus and The Minotaur, which involved a maze / labyrinth, so I created this maze generator and solver. I had also recently gotten into competitive programming, so I wanted to use the DFS algorithm.
https://github.com/joshualiu555/Chaos-Game/assets/53412192/c0c4fd18-c93e-4670-8fb1-7fe8a5c786a3
The Chaos Game is a simulation that creates Sierpinski’s triangle, a famous fractal. Here’s how it’s created:
1) Draw three dots in the form of a triangle 2) Start at point 1 3) Randomly choose a point 1-3 4) Draw a dot in the middle of those two points 5) This dot is your new point 6) Repeat from step 3 continuosly
https://github.com/joshualiu555/Game-Of-Life/assets/53412192/9d9ba153-121a-4040-98fe-ec7822718e38
There is a 2D Grid of cells. Each cell checks its 4 neighbors.
1) Every live cell with 2 or 3 neighbors lives on. 2) Every live cell with 4 neighbors dies due to overpopulation. 3) Every live cell with 1 neighbor dies due to underpopulation. 4) Every dead cell with 3 neighbors is reborn due to reproduction.
Valentine’s Gift
Some of my old friends and I did a Valentine’s gift exchange once where we each gave a present to every other person in the group. One of my friends had a running joke that she had crushes on three separate people in the grade in a very short period of time. I copied the code from an old tutorial I followed and changed up the sprites to make her face the main character and the enemies the three crushes.
Rock Paper Scissors
This was my first ever webdev project. I was on the train to visit an old friend in Philly, and I decided to learn the basics of HTML, CSS, and JS. Although it only took a few hours, it was a great intro into the world of webdev.