The Story So Far
Hello! I’m André; nice to meet you. I’m a girl dad, software engineer, audio engineer, tennis amateur, and I do my best to be a generous spouse too.
I live in amazing North Vancouver now, but have been fortunate enough to live in a few other wonderful places too: Sydney (Australia), San Francisco, and Boston. (Singapore too, if couch-surfing between family and friends’ places for months at a time counts, which I think it does.) I’m proud of being able to think in Celsius and Fahrenheit, kilometres and miles, and metres and feet. (In other words: Canadian?)
I goofed aroundstudied 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, who profoundly altered the path of my life for the better. After university, I worked at CSIRO for two years doing research in multimedia, then moved on to work on cineSync at Rising Sun Research. I’ve always sat close to the visual effects world, which is pretty neat since I always wanted to be into something to do with computers and entertainment even from a young age, so the crossover there seemed perfect.
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, and it was a blast becoming a full-time Mac developer working on a kick-ass application that thousands of people use everyday and love.
Life in the USA started when 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. I still have fond memories of it.) After Pixar, I was a Googler for twelve years, which taught me everything I know about software engineering at scale, leading teams, and managing with empathy.
I am grateful to Google and YouTube, which gave me the opportunity to move to Canada in 2022, where I live now. These days, I’m a software engineer at Apple. One day, hopefully you’ll find out what I work on there!
I have a keen interest in all things computing, from philosophies of open-source software to user interface design, the demoscene (where I made so many of my life-long friends), and theoretical limits of complexity. I love geeking out about programming languages (especially those crazy lambda-based ones), distributed systems, operating systems, and systems programming and performance.
As my degree may tell you, I also have a keen interest in psychology (particularly social psychology). I love Derren Brown, movies, games and other art that have three-dimensional characters, and ask the hard questions about life, morals and ethics. If I remember right, I believe I’m an ENTJ on the Myers-Briggs test.
