Billy Barrow

Passionate about building useful and solid solutions to people's problems; I am a software engineer. I have professional experience in developing .NET APIs alongside VueJS and Angular frontends.

When I'm not working I channel energy into my own software projects, balancing out my professional experience with proficiency in Vala, Python, PHP, and GNU/Linux operating systems. My personal projects tend to centre around my love for simple, solid solutions, as well as peer-to-peer systems that can work in times of infrastructure unavailability. I am also a certified amateur radio operator with the callsign ZL3FLY.

Luminara

🌟 Personal Project

Luminara is an LLM chat application I created in order to easily leverage large language models using only Free/Libre software on my own hardware. Complimenting this project is my Cosmic LLM, designed to try and give its own perspective on big metaphysical questions. Cosmic is the result of fine-tuning Dolphin-Mistral on various practical, philosophical, and religious texts.

PhotoFiddle

🌟 Personal Project

A combination of my interest in image signal processing and my father wanting to move his photo editing to a FLOSS stack. PhotoFiddle aims to provide the finishing touches to bitmap images after raw processing has taken place using programs like RawTherapee or Darktable.

CHECKIN-19

💼 Developed at Digital Stock

CHECKIN-19 is a non-invasive and action driven solution by Digital Stock originally made for coronavirus contact tracing at workplaces and essential services. Highlights of this project for me were designing the 6 letter unique codes for sites, working on a clean management dashboard for site owners, and building a customisable forms feature.

Bachelor of Information Technology

Graduated from the Southern Institute of Technology in 2019.

Education Perfect

💼 Developed at Education Perfect

Education Perfect is loved by students and teachers alike. I spent most of my time at EP enhancing the experience for teachers by simplifying their dashboard and making important parts of the system easier to navigate. I also contributed towards making the web interface more accessible for all users by helping to bring the application up to WCAG AA standards.

FarmTime

💼 Developed at Digital Stock

FarmTime is a product partially owned by Digital Stock providing timesheeting services to farms and their staff. Alongside the amazing Digital Stock team, I helped to build the administration dashboard for farm owners, which includes timesheet management, reporting, and job code management.

Portable Publications

🌟 Personal Project

When the desire to start vomiting my opinions onto the internet hit me, I needed a blogging platform I didn't hate. With goals to be agnostic of platform and easily be able to migrate my writings to any future decentralised system I might dream up, I made the PPUB format for packaging up markdown files with assets and metadata. The project has since evolved to include a GTK4 desktop editor for PPUB files called Publicate, and also support for packaging up video content.

Invercargill

🌟 Personal Project

I have grown very fond of the Vala programming language. But as a C# developer by trade, I found myself missing some of the convenience and utility of the IEnumerable interface. This made me decide to build my own! Named after the city I call home, Invercargill provides Vala with a familiar syntax for dealing with anything that has items to iterate. It has most of the functions you'd expect from C# plus others that I now find I miss when I'm working with C#.

LawVu

💼 Developed at LawVu

LawVu has one aim above all others; to help in-house legal teams do their best work, faster. Along with my fantastic colleagues, I have helped to further that aim by working on new features and leading multiple backend initiatives to help make the platform more secure and dependable.

NZART Southland Branch

🏛️ Executive Committee

I have been on the committee of the New Zealand Association of Radio Transmitters Southland Branch Incorporated on and off over the last 6 years. In November 2022 I was elected president, and I am currently serving my second year in that role. I run committee meetings, and engage in administrative tasks such as with banks. I also administer the club's online infrastructure, including our website, email, and cloud file storage.