About Me

(Last updated Mid 2024)

Hi, I'm Nathan Bird. Welcome to my personal portfolio website. I'm in my third year at BYU-Idaho studying Software Engineering, currently interning as a Web Backend Developer at FamilySearch.

I specialize in building and maintaining backend REST APIs and enjoy exploring new technologies. Feel free to explore my site and see what I've been working on!

NOTE¹: Projects are listed in reverse chronological order and may refer to earlier projects.

NOTE²: Many projects listed here reference a class I took at BYU-I in Fall 2023 where I worked on a new project every 2 weeks. Most of these projects were quick to write and insightful about a certain language or principle, and already had a demo video made for them which made them perfect/really easy to add for this portfolio page.

QuickPen

Mid 2024

This is an app that my wife requested for writing.

Punch Clock

Mid 2024

This was my first and longest ongoing project, starting as a simple CLI app to track coding hours for my dad by letting me "punch" in and out. Over time, I added features like work descriptions, Google Sheets integration for uploading entries, and a status command that showed me when to punch out to achieve a certain number of work hours. Recently, I upgraded it to an authenticated web app on my personal server, allowing for centralized time tracking accessible from any device, anywhere.

RPi Go Webserver

Mid 2024

The webserver hosting the website you are currently viewing this on is a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. The server was written in Go to serve the static html of my portfolio home page as well as host various backend REST endpoints for me to use in some of my other projects.

I don't have a video demo for this quite yet to see the code, but just take a look around this site.

Journal Bird App

Early 2024

This is a mobile application I made while working as a TA at BYU-I. My task was to research the Angular framework for mobile app development. I'm really proud of how far I was able to take this project, even though I couldn't get enough testers for long enough to meet the publishing standards.

GitHub Repo is private, but here's the link to the app's home page!
Journal Bird Home

Google Firestore Task Tracker

Late 2023

Project from that class. This was my introduction to cloud storage solutions. Kinda. The API I mention in the video that I had used previously was for Google Sheets, which I guess could technically be called cloud storage, haha. But for real, this was my first time using a real cloud database.

GitHub Repository

Expense Tracker Update! JDBC PosgreSQL

Late 2023

This was a refactor of my earlier Java Project to use a Postgres database instead of a plain old csv file. The program demo is essentially the same as the one in the earlier video, so skip to 2:33 in this video to go straight to the code demo.

GitHub Repository

Rust Lazy File Encryption

Late 2023

This was another project I made in my 2-week projects class at BYU-I. This was my first foray into Rust, which I found really challenging to learn at the time I was building this. I'd say it turned out pretty cool.

GitHub Repository

Java Expense Tracker

Late 2023

This was a project I did for one of my classes in school. The class was awesome as it was basically broken down into 2-week sprints, agile style, and in each sprint we were to choose a new project to build and show off. This is one of those projects, and I was really happy with it at the time.

GitHub Repository