About Me

I'm Andrew Robinson. I live and play in Seattle as a software developer during the day and a typical 20-something, aimless young adult during the night.

I typically spend my days obsessing over cache-locality, forming opinions of my colleagues exclusively by how well they've mastered C++11, and lobbing off-color insults over the fence at those who dare code in Javascript while concealing a tinge of jealousy.

As far back as I can remember I've known how to program. I started when I was young with languages like Visual Basic 5.0 and C. I made simple programs that did simple things. At some point my parents bought a Lego Mindstorms set, which came with this neat little programmable device called an RCX. It also came an awesome community of hackers who had built all kinds of wonderful compilers and tools around it for me to explore.

I remember registering for the LEGO community forum, using my real birthday, and being endlessly frustrated for 3 whole years because our laws didn't allow individuals under 13 to post and their forum didn't allow you to change your birthday. Frustrations aside, I spent countless hours tinkering with that brick, trying different things out and figuring out how to take an idea and manifest it into the world. It was addicting.

From there I've followed a pretty wild path. If you can name it I've probably written or hacked on one. Low-level embedded devices, kernel drivers, web infrastructure, e-commerce and line-of-business apps, networking stacks, compiler and parsers, advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning, distributed systems, signal processing, high-performance graphics and rendering. I've seen it all at this point as I've navigated and stumbled around in a countless number of languages, worked for an alarming number of companies, and written a mountain of code.

I believe pushing technology forward is one of the most interesting things one can do. Computer science has always captivated me. If you believe in a deterministic world then you'll believe the way we think and even everything that gives rise to that fleeting phenomenon we call consciousness is understandable, describable, and copyable. To me, computer science is the study of how we do that. Curiosity is fundamental to who we are and computer science is about building the machines that enable understanding and exploration. Algorithms are the ultimate levers by which we pry apart and manipulate our world and through them anything becomes possible. How couldn't that get you excited?