Hi!
My name is Andy. I am a Sr Engineering Manager at the New York Times. I like to take difficult, repetitive tasks and simplify them. Over the past 8 years I’ve quit my job, attended a local code school, joined a local startup, saw it grow and be acquired, and helped with integration into a new company. To say that it’s been a whirlwind would be an understatement.
Over the last two years I’ve made the transition from hands-on developer into management. It has been an interesting and at times difficult change. It’s forced me to learn new skills and shift my focus to people rather than code. Overall it’s been an exciting and fun journey and I look forward to continuing to learn and get better at supporting my teams.
I have had the opportunity to learn a lot about a lot of different technologies over my career. In school I learned a lot about UNIX and C++. Code school was able to show me how to use Ruby on Rails to quickly deliver an interactive web application. My experience at Flywheel taught me how technologies struggle to scale and the need to reinvent solutions over time in order to unlock future growth. And my transition to management has shown me how to support people and unlock the best version of themselves.
I know that’s pretty vague, so I’ve listed several of the key technologies I’ve gotten to learn about in the past. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without my exposure to these subjects:
- Kubernetes
- Ruby on Rails
- Containerization
- Google Cloud Platform
- Cloud Functions
- Pub/Sub
- Vendor Billing
- Support Tooling
- K8s Controllers
- K8s Operators
- SQL
- Testing
During my time at code school, I was fortunate enough to publish occasional guest posts on Silicon Prairie News documenting my time. Make sure you give them a read. They should give you a pretty good idea of where I came from.