Please note: This portfolio is a work in progress, and is in the process of being overhauled. Please pardon the dust!

You probably just want to grab my CV as a PDF here.

Hi there! My name’s Andi, but people on the internet call me duck. (the full stop is important!). I’m quite a quiet kind of person, but that doesn’t stop me from getting extremely over-excitable about the kind of stuff that some people would fall asleep listening to!

All of my knowledge and expertese is entirely self-taught over the course of the last 15 years or so - everything from system administration, to software engineering, to service orchestration. I’ve learnt it as I go, and I’ll continue doing that all the way until the day I retire (some day)!

When I’m not learning about new things, travelling the planet, or working on far, far too many projects, you can usually find me either tinkering with LED strips, knowing far too much about Electric Vehicles, or playing Rhythm games.

Positions Held

Lead Developer / Operator / Project Manager | 2015-2018

projectflower.eu/about

Flower is a non-profit, independent, international Arcade Network, with a focus on imported Asian Arcade games. Since my co-founding of the project in 2015, I grew the network from small roots with only one arcade, less than 20 players, and 3 co-founders, to supporting over 15 locations across Europe, over 650 players, and a worldwide development team of over 20 volunteers from a diverse set of backgrounds. The software suite we worked on is still considered the gold standard in its field, and is used by numerous others across the world.

Some of the things I worked on included:

• Overseeing the direction of the project since its inception, ensuring that our constituent arcades (and their players) remain happy and informed, and our development team’s members are confident with their work
• Developing the majority of our arcade communication server, Kailua, with a Python (2.7, with a refactor to 3.6) / Flask / SQLAlchemy (MariaDB) based stack from scratch, based on reverse engineering data from other team members
• Developing the majority of our Web Interface, Vulkan, written in PHP with the Laravel 5 framework in the backend and Bootstrap / SASS / jquery / socket.io for the responsive frontend, as well as styling logos and other graphical assets
• Some minor development work on other tools, including a C++ metadata scraper
• Extensive usage of Version Control (git) to manage the numerous branches and forks of the above applications
• Configuring and managing numerous Dockerized services, including a confidential Gitlab server, automatic CI and deployment using gitlab-ci and nginx-gen, Sentry error monitoring, Graylog environment monitoring, automated backup scheduling, and secured arcade connectivity with OpenVPN, among others

theBIGGAME

Production / Head of Streaming | 2014-2018

thebiggame.org

theBIGGAME is a long running, quarterly LAN Party (gathering of PC Gamers) in the Southampton area. With over 40 events in the past 20 years, it has grown from very small beginnings to a gathering of over 100 participants, continuing to regularly sell-out within weeks of availability and attracting sponsorship from brands including Novatech, Dominos, Plantronics, Tesoro, and i-rocks, among others.

My responsibilities included:

• Managing the event’s Live Stream (shown at twitch.tv,and projected internally), which included setting up IP camera, HDMI, and NDI feeds to a short pre-event deadline, producing and managing these feeds using the vMix live production switching software throughout the event, and moderating the community chat
• Producing fresh and current graphical assets in Photoshop, Premiere, and InDesign for use both as Stream content and for large scale print
• Developing dynamic, animated, and vibrant HTML / Javascript / node.js for use with our nodeCG Graphics suite, which is used to power the event’s dynamic graphics - these graphics receive data from a variety of sources, including the last.fm API, Google Calendar, and an internal dashboard, helping us cut down on manual entry
• Delivering new, inventive solutions to problems within a tight budget, including Raspberry Pi-based Remote IP Cameras, and a custom nginx-rtmp based Internal Streaming solution to reduce bandwidth and improve reliability
• Managing talent and assisting guests to ensure the smooth running of the event, including commentary teams