My name is Sam Liu. I am a 19-year-old Computer Science major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am passionate about books (not necessarily literature), living, music, philosophy, and programming. This blog stands as a self-reflection journal and public diary. I also used to maintain a large number of how-to guides for linux-related topics that were published on this blog, but a server crash in 2007 lead to 2 1/2 years worth of data loss. For whatever reason, if you read this blog, do drop a comment. My readers include a smattering of people including past employers, potential employers, overseas acquaintances, close friends, acquaintances, strangers — even parents of people I know. Whoever you are, I’d love to hear from you!

I love code! I started programming in 7th grade because of a good friend of mine, Josiah Wang, who wrote an open-source prose-based game engine using PHP/AdoDB/Smarty Templating. I later joined the open-source project under him and made a separate engine of my own from the ground up. Closing my stint in game building, I started to build a lot of side projects, including facebook applications and a system to keep track of distance race times. Later, I was hired by Magid Computers in New York City to do front-end work and PHP coding for various platforms including WordPress templating, Drupal, and a custom system written in PHP using the Codeigniter framework. During the summer of 2009, I flew out to Berkeley, California to work for Indinero.com, a startup that is automating accounting for small businesses. I designed the alpha analytics feature in rails and flex. Today I am a freshman student at the University of Illinois. I’ve done some interesting things: salsa dancing, swing (dancing not java swing), acapella, work at an agile startup (Merge.FM = awesome), and a bunch of other random things. I do what I want, talk to me! I love meeting new people.