Brian Lam

Throughout my life, I’ve always loved learning new things, using that knowledge to build something, and showing and explaining my creations to others.

As a high school STEM teacher with an engineering degree, I taught engineering students how to break down problems into parts, brainstorm solutions creatively, then build and test their ideas. When the pandemic came and I had to quickly transition to teaching physics remotely, I was at least thankful for the chance to try out new technology in my virtual classroom, and that my students had a lot of experience with live streaming and social media. I hosted my video lessons online so that my class could go back and watch them on their own time, but the loss of the live chat and interaction between learners made me wish that more tools were available. The next summer, I left teaching and started coding bootcamp, and for my first full-stack project, I built WeView, the video sharing platform that I had wished existed a year ago. Rather than clone YouTube directly, I designed the comment system so that every single comment is time stamped to the video being played, they would display at the same time in the video for future viewers akin to a livestream chat, and that the viewers could respond to the video and reply to each other without the necessity of tuning in live.