Updated 12 September 2024

About

Heliodex
/'hiliəʊdɛks/

I'm Lewin Kelly, a software developer from Scotland, better known online by my alias Heliodex.

I work with a wide variety of technologies, from frontend and backend web apps to embedded and game development:

  • I use Svelte as my frontend web framework of choice, as it provides excellend developer experience and performance, with many features built in that make it enjoyable to work with. I usually pair this with SvelteKit for encapsulating both frontend and backend code, as it makes communication between the two a breeze and allows for ultra-fast iteration velocity.
  • For server-side Javascript and Typescript development, Bun, Deno, and Node are all amazing projects that I use regularly.
  • Lua was my first ever programming language, and is remains a favourite of mine due to its simplicity, flexibility, and speed. At risk of sounding like a heretic, I find it most useful when enhanced with compilers or preprocessors such as Yuescript, Moonscript, and Darklua.
  • Luau further improves on Lua with better performance, newer syntactic features, a wider standard library, and gradual typing. This, alongside the ecosystem of tooling available for the language and compatible tools from Lua, makes for a far better development experience.
  • Go is a language I've been learning and loving more recently, a compiled language that strikes a great balance of high performance, dead simplicity, and a great standard library. I often use it when I need a native application, or when I something a bit more performant than my usual favourite languages.

I'm a forever fan of all truly free and open source software, and I try to make as much of my work available and build in the open as much as possible. I'm also a big fan of all AI, machine learning, and crypto technologies which help me hugely while building software, both as tools and as components of my projects.

For me, programming is the perfect mix of logic and real-world problem solving, and I'm always looking for new and exciting projects and ideas to work on or contribute to!