Tom Sears

Software Developer

About Me

My name is Tom Sears and I consider myself a full-stack web developer – where the stack starts at bare metal. I was introduced to Q-Basic at 12 years old and have been banging out code in one form or another ever since. These days I do most of my work with web technologies, but still duck over to the desktop or console when I need to.

I've spent most of my post-collegiate career working with Microsoft SharePoint as a consultant - and not strictly in development activities. Estimating, infrastructure setup, user documentation, project management and business analysis are all hats I’ve worn at one point or another. On the tech side, most of my professional experience centers around parts of the Microsoft stack. SharePoint uses ASP.NET (not MVC), html, css, and javascript, but largely takes the place of the middle and back-end of the web development stack in favor of its own rich object model and APIs. For my more recent projects, I’ve been favoring nodejs and express for application building.

As of late I have been transitioning away from SharePoint-related technologies in favor of a more traditional full-stack web development role.

Recent Projects

Node Weather

I decided to take my existing weather app (described below) and rebuild it in node / aws / react as an exercise. This project is the backend portion comprised of the node application set up to run as a lambda behind api gateway.

Game Of War

As part of a job interview I was tasked with developing an engine for playing the card game War. I decided if I was going to do it, it may as well end up as a portfolio piece. A companion site was created to showcase some of the functionality - the ability to actually watch a game being played is coming soon™!

Weather

http://weather.tsears.net. Source available on github

A clean, modern site for current weather and forecasts. I built this over the course of about a week to experiment with asp.net on linux through .net core. I also wanted to focus on design elements to get a clean look and feel.

Operation Breakdown

https://www.operation-breakdown.com

Operation Breakdown on Laptop and Phone

Operation Breakdown is a web-based repository for storing data gathered by parsing replay files (called demos) provided by Valve from the game Counter Strike: Global Offensive. The basic idea is that a parsing tool goes over the demo file compiling statistics based on in-game events. The results of that parsing are submitted to this site, where users will be able to review a detailed breakdown of their performance during a match.

Operation Breakdown is the result of 8 months of part-time solo development, and development continues to this day. At the moment it is in a closed beta mode, though the data is available for anyone to browse.

tsears.net

That's right, the site you're looking at!. Built using jekyll and hosted on github pages.

Contact

Source available on github

All of my projects incorporate some sort of flyout form that users can use to send feedback or questions. I grew tired of duplicating the code to handle that, so I created a microservice in nodejs specifically to handle the business of receiving the data and sending me an email with the contents.

Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) will be used so that I only need to run one instance of the service without having to worry about cross-origin requests.