Hello, I'm Andrew and this is a little bit of information about me.

I have alway been interested in technology and computers. Around age 8 I started learning to program on my dad's Radio Shack TRS-80. I learned the BASIC programming language and had fun writing short games and even some school projects. As a teenager I studied and passed the exam to obtain an amateur radio license (some call it ham radio). I set up a packet radio BBS using an old IBM XT that I scrapped together. For several years I enjoyed running the BBS and was amazed at how messages could be passed all over the world utilizing only RF links and digital modes. This was especially amazing for me since I grew up in an extremely rural part of the state of Colorado in the US. I sometimes felt isolated growing up in the country but my BBS helped me feel connected to the world.

My passion for computers and technology led me to pursue a degree in computer science. I currently hold Bachelor of Science (CTU 2005) and Master of Science (UCCS 2015) degrees in computer science. While working on my degrees I was also working full time. My love for packet radio led me to a career in computer networking. I started out in network operations working tickets for outages and eventually moved on to network security. More recently I've had roles in network architecture and have even done some independent consulting.

Throughout my career I've used scripting and programming skills to build tools to help perform my daily job. Early on I used PERL and the Expect module to interact with command line routers. Over time, especially when I was a network security engineer, I wrote scripts to parse configs and index network information in searchable databases. I've written programs and scripts in many different languages over the years.

I am married and have two kids and I love spending time with my family. We go on hikes together and work in the yard together. I achieved the rank of Eagle Scout as a youth, and I love participating in scout activities as an adult. I am a den leader for my daughter's cub scout den and am a committee member in my son's scout troop. When I'm not hanging out with my family I love to tinker with home automation. I have an instance of Home Assistant running on a RaspberryPi and have many things in our home automated.