Elara
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© 2025 Elara Liu | All rights reserved.

Themed by EnjuFolio · Crafted by Elara Liu

Projects

Selected technical projects and works-in-progress, ordered by year.

  • 2025

  • Airtable TS

    Elara Liu

    Role: Independent Designer & Developer

    I built Airtable TS as a tiny, fetch-based JS/TS client to replace Airtable’s unmaintained, Node-only SDK (which still relies on deprecated APIs like url.parse). It adds a type-safe façade, optional caching, and well-tested, signed releases so Airtable-backed research and data workflows are easier to write, safer to deploy, and reproducible over time.

    LinkCode

  • Gravatar Worker

    Elara Liu

    Role: Independent Designer & Developer

    I built Gravatar Worker as a fast, cache-friendly Gravatar proxy on Cloudflare Workers to replace the official service’s slow origins, PNG-only avatars, hash-only API, and blocking in regions like mainland China. It lets developers self-host a gravatar-compatible endpoint that accepts raw emails, serves modern formats like AVIF/WebP, and uses edge caching to keep profile images responsive and under their control.

    LinkCode

  • SafePassage

    Elara Liu, Wendy Huang, Yihan Yang, Dingcheng Wang, Amiin Ismail Muse, Nader Rahhal, Lydia Ketema

    Role: Team Lead, Designer, Developer

    Advised by: Prof. Christopher K. Riesbeck

    I led a cross-functional team to build SafePassage, a web app that lets travelers with medical conditions generate a QR code linking to a localized, read-only medical profile. When scanned, the code shows emergency-relevant information in the local language and triggers SMS alerts to chosen contacts via a serverless backend, giving clinicians enough context to act while preserving the traveler’s privacy and control.

    Code

  • 2024

  • @zl-asica/react

    Elara Liu

    Role: Independent Designer & Developer

    I created and maintain a small TypeScript-first library of React hooks and utilities that cleanly separates server-safe utilities from browser-only hooks, generates docs directly from types, and ships signed multi-runtime builds via JSR so teams get predictable behavior and clear server–client mental models.

    10.5281/zenodo.15475245LinkCode

  • SuzuBlog

    Elara Liu

    Role: Independent Designer & Developer

    I designed and maintain SuzuBlog, a Next.js–based blog system that favors file-based authorship, a single config file, and static-by-default delivery so personal and academic sites stay fast, accessible, and easy to manage while still supporting i18n, comments, analytics, and llms.txt.

    10.5281/zenodo.15377307LinkCode

  • Goshsha

    Elara Liu, Tongze Mao, Tayven Taylor, Jason Bhatnagar, Jianwen Qi

    Role: Team Lead, UX Designer, React Native Developer

    Advised by: Prof. Matthew J. Bietz

    I led a team to redesign and rebuild Goshsha, an AR retail app that lets shoppers scan products to see creator content, reviews, and virtual try-ons; we overhauled the UX for Gen Z shoppers, added community and onboarding flows, and implemented faster scanning and data retrieval in a React Native (Expo) + Firebase codebase.

  • 2023

  • LifeTune

    Elara Liu, Tongze Mao, Jianwen Qi

    Role: Team Lead, Designer & iOS Developer

    I led a small team to design and implement LifeTune, an iOS health app that turns fragmented fitness, nutrition, sleep, and mood data into a single “health score” with small, actionable suggestions, grounded in competitive analysis, interviews with four user groups, and iterative SwiftUI prototyping focused on simplification, routine fit, and motivation.

  • 2019

  • BelugaSubs

    Elara Liu

    Role: Founder & Executive Director, Full-Stack Developer, Operations Lead

    I founded and led BelugaSubs, a 130-volunteer localization collective that ships ~40 subtitled tech and cooking videos per week for Chinese audiences. I built the internal infrastructure—a React + Node.js forced-alignment workstation and web drive—and designed agile workflows with tiered QA and SLAs, scaling the group to more than 20,000 videos and a paid service for top-100 Bilibili creators.

    Link