About Me

[–] Me on a rooftop in Milan. Photo by my brother Jeremy.

[–] Me, my wife, and our two mini dachshunds, Ernie and Millie.

I’m a software engineer living in Boulder, Colorado, not far from my hometown of Longmont, Colorado.

My dad sparked my interest in computers early on. At 11 or 12 I found and read an excellent introductory Java textbook At one point, I printed all ~800 pages out. No binding or anything, just a big stack of paper. Simpler times…. I was immediately hooked, but quickly became interested in developing graphical interfaces for my programs. Building GUIs in Java proved tiresome, so I started to poke around with web programming… and well, I haven’t stopped since.

In high school, I was deeply involved in the FIRST Robotics Competition with the incredible Team 1619 Up-A-Creek Robotics. The relationships I developed with mentors on the team grew into a sequence of professional opportunities. First, I interned for Workday on the team from freshly acquired Gridcraft Workday’s stock price has tripled since this acquisition., a startup co-founded by an Up-A-Creek mentor. Two years later, that same mentor co-founded Left Hand Robotics, aiming to build autonomous robots for outdoor labor-intensive tasks. I worked for Left Hand Robotics on-and-off starting a handful of months after its conception up to its acquisition by The Toro Company.

During this time, I was a student at Northwestern University, studying Computer Science in the Engineering school. When the COVID pandemic hit, I withdrew from school and went to work full-time for Left Hand Robotics, building the software customers used to watch their robots work By then we’d moved from snow clearing to area mowing. I got to dabble in computational geometry, such cool stuff. (web apps for ingesting and visualizing sensor data, with services behind them to query and manage it). I stayed on through the Toro acquisition, building shared platform tooling and a data ingestion and visualization app for a hardware product. My time at LHR and then Toro was a blast, such a great space for learning and building cool stuff. Building fullstack applications is fun, but it’s made so much more interesting when the applications are tied into the real world.

After about a year at Toro, I wanted a change to keep my career moving and to see how a different kind of company operated. I joined Viget, a small client-services shop, as a JavaScript developer. The work was varied: I built live video streaming and playback features over WebRTC, charts for visualizing multidimensional historical data, and a tree-based graphical editor backed by Elixir and Phoenix. I also led an internal hackathon It was part of Pointless, Viget’s internal hackathon tradition. Brian (CEO) wrote about it. that ended up drawing participation from half the company. Viget is a great company, great people, great culture. I think I prefer direct ownership of the problem space though, as opposed to being a consultant.

Beyond that, my paused degree was gnawing at me. On one hand, the situation with Viget was great. On the other, I knew if I didn’t go back for the degree now, I might never finish it out. And so, with one of my big projects winding down, I left Viget to return to Northwestern. I had about a year’s worth of credits left to finish, but I compressed it down into two quarters. The credits I had left were a mix of core requirements and electives, so I ended up with a pretty diverse course load Some fun ones: Astrophysics, Greek Mythology, and History of Programming Languages, where I gave a 90-minute blackboard lecture on early papers on the concept of abstraction.. I had a genuinely good time. Something about coming back fresh and a bit more mature just clicked, and it ended up being a really nice stretch.

I graduated in 2024 and joined Workday, the same company I’d interned for back in high school. These days I work on platform stuff, building systems that other engineers build on top of. The work is backend-focused, but the platform angle makes it more meta and interesting. It’s spanned a handful of languages, and there’s no shortage of hard problems to dig into.

Outside of work, I’m still mentoring the software teams at Up-A-Creek Robotics, the same FIRST team that kicked all this off back in high school. And I tinker on side projects here and there. A recurring theme for me is multiplayer web games You can play some of them at arcade.andrewt.io, anomia.andrewt.io, and hive.andrewt.io., inspired by Jackbox and the like. I love playing games with friends, and typically those are physical games. But digital opens up mechanics you just can’t do with a physical game, and that’s the interesting part. A few of my projects are on my resume if you’re curious.