phase1geo/outliner

Outlining application for elementary OS

Hello!

My name is Trevor Williams. I live in the USA in the state of Wisconsin. I am a husband and father and have a passion for software development as a hobby. Professionally, I am a design verification engineer, but in the evenings you can usually find me on my sofa, coding away on various open source applications that I have created.

In the past, I worked on the Covered project, an ambitious Verilog code coverage program that I started around 2000. After toiling away for around 10 years on that project, I shifted gears to work on some Tcl-based projects, including a pretty nice code editor called TKE that I still work on as time permits. I use this editor for working on all of my other projects.

During my time working on TKE, I became familiar with elementary OS, using it on an underwhelming HPE Stream laptop in which the OS ran remarkably well. Fast and with attention to details, I quickly took to liking this OS. When they announced the Houston project which included its own AppCenter application store, I thought it would be fun to create some quality applications for that platform, written to conform with its HIG and development tools. Minder, a mind-mapping application, and later Outliner, an outlining application, were both born.

Since then, I have created a text conversion graphical application called TextShine, an image markup utility called Annotator, and a journaling application called Journaler. I am also working on a new application which is a directory watch application which will allow the user to take customizable actions on file changes within watched directories called Actioneer.

I really appreciate all of the terrific work and development that has gone into tools like GitHub, elementary OS, Travis CI and Flathub which make developing and distributing open source applications so much easier than things used to work in the "old days" when I first started this type of work. My very first "open source" project was an unknown bug reporting application called Mantid which was hosted on a Geocities/Yahoo server, controlled by an SCM utility called PCVS. No one knew where to find it and the tools that I used to create it were rudimentary. Thank goodness for modern advances in computing, am I right?

I have written code in C, C++, Tcl, Vala, Perl, Python, Yacc, Lex, Make, PHP, Java and the list goes on and on. These days I am most proficient in C++, Tcl and Vala, but I love learning new things and new ways to do things. I have extensively used CVS, ClearCase (ugh), Mercurial, Perforce and Git for source control, preferring Git for most projects. And since I have mostly been the sole main developer of my software projects, I have experience in the whole development stack, from coding, design, and documentation to website development, support and more!

The greatest benefit of open source software, in my opinion, is that it is a place where anyone from anywhere with limited resources can create something of value and share it with the rest of the world. I have met and worked with some terrific people from every corner of the planet. Who knew that little old me could have that sort of reach and make the impact that I have been able to make from the comfort of my sofa at home? Pretty cool if you ask me.