Welcome! I'm Andrew, a fullstack software engineer living in Boston.
I work for Wolfram Research on Wolfram | Alpha.
Previously I worked for Integral in Detroit with Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC as a Mobile (iOS) Engineer on the Mobile Infrastructure Team and with Ford Motor Company on the Dynamic Routing team. Other software dev related escapades include participating in Wolfram Summer School 2020 and writing for this blog.
PM -> Software Engineer
I began my journey into software as a Product Manager, but quickly realized that I wanted to build rather than manage products. Tutorial by tutorial and book by book, I transitioned from acting as a business liason to tech, to acting as a tech liason to business.
If We Want it We Build It
For the first year or so I lived by the modus operandi of "If I want it, I build it."
Curious how GraphQL compares to REST? Build an API with both and see for yourself. Can React Native supplant native development? Build with both and form your own opinion.
This approach worked great!...but it came with major shortcomings: it doesn't scale, and it gets lonely quick.
Adjusting the motto slightly I now prefer "If we want it, we build it."
Sounds motivational-postery, but I mean it. I spend most of my time experimenting with different techniques for growing codebases into something people look forward to collaborating on, and how pair programming and test-driven development cooperate to do the same.
From this I've developed several tenets of my core software belief system.
- A) Developer experience WILL manifest in user experience
- B) Developer experience is a product of codebase architecture, developer-to-manager and developer-to-developer interaction, and freedom to choose the right tools
- C) Without the presence of a shared, domain-driven langauge uniting both codebase and business, most meetings are just people talking past each other
justkeepclicking.io
justkeepclicking.io is where I learn in public and broadcast development techniques I see working for my teams to the wider community.
It's like open source learning.