Introduction

Hi. I’m Andy. I’ve been developing software in some form or another since I was a pre-teen. One of my first “products” was a Zork-like text adventure game on my dad’s Commodore 64, written in BASIC. I was the star of my 7th grade science fair! Since then, I’ve played with various languages like Pascal and C/C++. When I was college I took a Java Jan-Term class and fell in love – well, at least as close to love as is socially acceptable when talking about a programming language.

I knew I wanted to work with Java, and so when IBM offered me a job to work in Java on the server-side on the WebSphere Application Server, I was all-in. I’ve been at IBM almost 20 years now – and still never too far from “WAS”. I’ve worked on the logging and tracing framework, the EJB container, the classloader and OSGi runtime, and most recently I’ve worked as the Web Services Architect – playing (yes playing, this stuff is fun for me!) with RESTful services and GraphQL.

Along the way, I’ve met and worked with many wonderful people, and have learned a lot. My hope is to share some of my experiences and ideas on this site. Even after 20+ years of learning, I still don’t know it all – and I’m still learning – so if I get something wrong, or if you know of a better way to do something, please let me know.

A little more about me:

• I’m married with three awesome kids.
• Music is a big part of my life. I play bass (primary) and guitar (still learning), and all of my kids are currently taking lessons in various instruments. I’ve even dabbled in writing music.
• I’m a Christian, and my faith is also a big part of my life. I play on my church’s praise team and like to volunteer to help people whenever I can.

Thanks for checking out my site.