Hello! I’m André, an Australian-American currently living in the Bay Area, California. Like most other Bay Area folks, I emigrated here from somewhere else—in my case, Sydney, Australia. I’m very happy that I can think in fahrenheit & celsius, miles & kilometres, and feet & metres. (I think I even know what a fluid ounce is these days.)

I goofed around studied at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, eventually graduating with Honours in Computing Science and Psychology under the watchful eye of Manuel Chakravarty. After university, I worked at CSIRO for two years doing research in multimedia, then moved on to work on cineSync at Rising Sun Research, where I learnt how to ship a 1.0 product. I never thought I’d end up in visual effects, but I always wanted to be into something with computers and entertainment even from a young age, so the crossover there seemed perfect.

Despite Rising Sun Research being a fantastic place to be, I made the possibly foolish decision in 2007 to pursue my small dream of becoming self-employed, which I’m glad to say worked out far better than I ever expected. I worked on RapidWeaver by Realmac Software full-time for a few years. It was a blast becoming a full-time Mac developer working on a kick-ass application that thousands of people use everyday and love.

Since then, I moved to San Francisco to work at Pixar. Scratch off one of my childhood dream goals that I’d never thought would come true. (Everything that you think about working there is probably true.) These days, I’m at Google & YouTube.

I have a keen interest in all things computing, from philosophies of open-source software to user interface design, systems programming, and theoretical limits of complexity, with a special focus on programming languages (especially them lambda-based ones). I believe that maths1 can be as beautiful as Earth’s most treasured places. I believe that political science and psychology is as valuable as computational thinking for future generations to understand. I believe that Black Lives Matter, and diversity, equity and inclusion is worth fighting for.

As my degree may tell you, I also have a keen interest in psychology. I love movies, games and other art that have three-dimensional characters, and ask the hard questions about life, morals and ethics. I’m a Type 9 Enneagram, and an ENTJ on Myers-Briggs.

  1. Or “math”, for carbon-based lifeforms who speak American English. ↩︎