I'm Lucas Girouard-Stranks, known around here as lithiumtoast. I'm a self-taught developer equipped with a formal Computer Science education. Based in Canada 🇨🇦.
My dev journey began at 12, reading and writing Visual Basic 6 in an online open-source community called Mirage Source back in around 2005. That community was, in its own way, a community of practice around indie game development and it had a huge influence on me.
It was there I discovered I could build structures with my mind, like playing with Lego. Later, during university, I learned something even better: these structures I build can bring value to other people's lives in countless ways.
Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution later gave me language to what I'd felt all along: the hands-on imperative, the belief that you truly understand something only by building it yourself. That ethos has guided me ever since.
Today, my focus is on C# and C for low-level systems (with an eye on Zig) originally for video games. I'm particularly interested in native ahead-of-time compilation for .NET—building native libraries and executables that are small, fast, and highly performant. As I get older, my ideas are expanding into the bigger picture of taking this form factor into larger real world problems and solutions.
I follow the principles of the open source way, not just for software, but as a way of being. This GitHub is where I share personal ideas and solutions born from curiosity, growth, and the simple joy of building. My hope is that by making my work free and public, you might find value in it too.
In the grand scheme, I'm interested in applying what I know to the challenges we face as a human collective: poverty, hunger, health, education, climate change, gender equality, water, sanitation, energy, urbanization, environment, and social justice.