I'm Sam Wight. I'm a software engineer who specializes in JavaScript, Ruby, and Rust. My work professionally has been mostly focused on web development, but I've done everything from building an error checking algorithm that catches manufacturing errors to building a text editor that integrates NLP. Most recently, I worked as a part-time software engineer for The Nine, helping them create a new version of their CMS.

I'm currently a junior at The University of Alabama where I study computer science and mathematics. While there, I've served in multiple leadership positions at several CS-related student organizations. Most recently, I served as the president of Blueprint at UA, a student organization I founded that builds free, open-source software for local nonprofits.

Feel free to scroll down to read the rest of what I've worked on. If you want to get in touch with me, DM me on Twitter or email me here. I check both regularly and will get back to you as soon as possible.

My projects

I've worked on several different projects during my free time. Here's a few of them:

• Chorale - Chorale is a Notion renderer that can render large Notion pages in 10ms on average and sits at 101 GitHub stars. It's written in Rust, with a custom templating engine that renders minified HTML efficiently. The initial version of the project was written in React and got turned into the react-notion package, which currently sits at 998 GitHub stars.
• last-fm-visualization - Tool written in Python that traverses the Last.FM API as a graph. It stores the results in Redis for efficiency, then outputs the results to a weighted edge table that can be viewed in Gephi.
• minymal - A well-designed, minimal Ghost theme that's optimized for performance. Built using Tailwind CSS. It's the theme that powers this website!
• gatsby-starter-simple-tailwind - A simple Gatsby starter built for getting a Tailwind CSS environment running as fast as possible. It comes with PurgeCSS and Typescript set up by default. Built to be a blank canvas for whatever you want to create with it.

What I've done

• Blueprint at UA (Founder and President): September 2019 - Present: Blueprint at UA is a student organization at The University of Alabama that creates open-source software for nonprofits. I founded the organization in September of 2019 and currently serve as president, serving on the exec team to oversee the direction of the organization. Our exec team oversees and assists our development teams, plans events for our members, and works with our nonprofit partners to make sure their needs are being met.
  
  I founded Blueprint at UA because I saw two large problems. First, I observed that smaller nonprofits had a desperate need for software development services but often didn't have the funds to pay for those services. Second, I saw that CS students at UA struggled to find opportunities on-campus that could help them grow as a developer. I noticed that these two needs could cancel each other out, and worked to found Blueprint at UA, a student organization whose goal is to fix both of these problems.
• Nucor (Level II Engineering Co-Op), May 2020 - August 2020: I worked as a co-op for Nucor, a steel company, using software engineering to improve manufacturing processes. I developed the first version of an algorithm for checking for manufacturing errors using plant sensor data. I also improved the efficacy of internal file-syncing software, drastically reducing memory usage by 97%. I worked heavily with Transact-SQL, C#, and frontend Javascript frameworks to design fast, efficient dashboards for plant operators.