Hi, I'm Andrew Garrett
I'm a Web Software Engineer, and I want to make software that people love.
Right now I'm a freelance software engineer. I have been working with the Wikimedia Foundation on the future of MediaWiki for over six years, and I consult with other organisations to help them make MediaWiki work for them. I'm a quick learner, and I want to broaden my technical expertise, by working with interesting technology on innovative products that make life easier and more intuitive for people.
When I'm not working, I'm planning my next trip, trying to learn a new language, reading or brewing or drinking beer.
Highlights
- More than five years' experience developing for a top-5 website.
- Experienced remote freelancer and consultant.
- Proven ability to understand project requirements and to work independently.
- Keen interest in rapid deployment, DevOps and continuous integration.
My skills
Technical Knowledge
I've bolded things I am especially strong in.
- Languages
- Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Perl, Node.JS, C/C++, Bash Scripting.
- Databases and Caching Layers
- MySQL, Redis, memcached, MSSQL, PostgreSQL.
- Frameworks and APIs
- jQuery, Bootstrap, LESS, Flask, Mustache / Handlebars / LightnCandy, OpenCV, ROS, RequireJS, AngularJS, Grunt, Bower, Composer, Cucumber, PHPUnit, QUnit.
- Source Control
- Git (GitHub, Gerrit, Phabricator), Subversion.
- System administration
- Microservices architecture, Site Reliability Engineering, General Linux administration, Puppet, Vagrant Apache, Squid, Puppet, Nagios.
Skills and personal attributes
- 5 years' experience with distributed teams and remote work, translating into a strong ability to communicate asynchronously and to work independently.
- Extensive experience with rapid prototyping and Agile methodology.
- Real full-stack experience. Able to work on back-end, front-end and DevOps.
- Strong ability to quickly and accurately understand and verify user needs and to convert them into working code.
- Extensive experience with localised and internationalised code base.
- 7 years' experience working with free and open-source software
- Multilingual (EN N, NL B1, FR A2, FI A1) and experienced at working respectfully with people from varying cultural backgrounds.
My work
Google, Inc. (2015–present)
- Key software engineer for Google Classroom API
- Lead development for several significant features.
- Production experience for service with >20 million users.
Wikimedia Foundation (2008–2015)
- Developed technology for a wiki-based Living Style Guide based on our component-driven JavaScript UI framework, including simulation of vision impairment.
- Regular contributor to, and avid user and tinkerer of MediaWiki's vagrant configuration.
- Original author of MediaWiki's notification system, now used on all Wikimedia projects including English Wikipedia.
- Extensive contributor to MediaWiki's next-generation discussion system.
- Primary author of MediaWiki's rule-based anti-spam and vandalism software.
Cancer Council Australia (2010–2016)
I am working as a consultant with Cancer Council Australia's Clinical Guidelines Network, as technical lead of the Cancer Guidelines Wiki.
Extensive engineering work across the full stack in response to business needs. For example:
- Tool for inline public and internal commenting on produced clinical guidelines.
- Comprehensive literature management and appraisal workflow.
- Solely responsible for hosting setup, including configuration management, security, development of Vagrant-based test system.
See my work
To give you a better idea of the type of work I can do, here are some samples of projects and changes that I'm proud of. I have more samples that previous employers have asked me to share privately only.
- I implemented a robust import and conversion infrastructure to import data from various legacy systems into MediaWiki's new discussion system.
- As part of my work on Wikimedia's Living Style Guide I wrote a MediaWiki extension to demonstrate the features of our in-house JavaScript UI framework.
- In my final year of university, I wrote ROS modules (1, 2) to read from an image topic, detect alphabet blocks on a table, and normalise their position relative to a mechanical arm. Video