About
Passion Meets Drive
I couldn’t be more grateful for the life I have and the people in it. We all have strengths and unique talents. At my core is a unique balance of curiosity, contagious passion, empathy, creativity, and a relentless drive for pushing the envelope. Although these traits drove my parents crazy as a kid, they have become honed superpowers as a software engineer. My “North Star” is efficiency and quality. Innovation is often a guiding light. Delivering what was thought to be impossible has been a recurring theme throughout my career. As I’ve transitioned into a servant leader, that theme continues. Even with the most diverse teams, I find unique ways to grow engineer’s strengths into superpowers. Being in the trenches alongside the engineers inspires a flourishing culture of empathy, extreme ownership, and cohesion. Transforming teams while developing applications is my sweet spot and what I find the most fulfilling.
Hi! I’m Andy Barrows. Ex-military and formally trained in UI/UX. Throughout my career I’ve chased having a more positive impact than before. This led me further back in the stack across a variety of languages and frameworks. Front-end engineer evolved into full stack software engineer. From there, I transitioned into leadership roles. I was promoted to Lead Engineer and then promoted again to the Manager of Software Engineering. Despite the job titles, coding is my first love. Even as a manager, I’m still in VS Code everyday. I have an insatiable appetite for learning and growing both professional and personally. On the personal side, I have a brilliant / hilarious wife and two amazing boys. If I’m half as lucky as I was growing up, I’ll impart the same amount of wisdom, work ethic, and values that my parents gifted me.
Career
Recent Projects.
These are the highlights of the past few years. Many of these are for the company I work for so the code repos cannot be shared. Luckily, most of the final product is public so they can be viewed as well as the source on the client side.
Proficiencies
Honed expertise over 26,000 contributions.
Remembering back to 2007 when I was at Centriq Training, they first focused on web fundamentals and taught us the main languages that I still use everyday. Even after spending over a decade pursuing mastery in these languages and core concepts, I learn new things within each of them on a regular basis.
Skillsets
SPECIALIZATIONS AND EXPERTISE.
When you add optimism, drive, and natural curiosity existing skills are honed and new skills are uncovered Forged from countless lessons learned on past projects, keeping a keen eye on the fastest moving industry in the world, and always I didn’t have the previous year but I have noticed a pattern. I have steadily moved down the stack. Just like stepping through breakpoints, I always want to understand how the mechanism works. How can it be manipulated and more importantly how can it be improved.
01. USER EXPERIENCE.
02. DATA SCIENCE AND ANALYTICS..
03. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
04. WEB DESIGN.
05. DIGITAL MARKETING.
06. PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING.
07. SEO.
08. ONLINE COMPLIANCE.
09. AUTOMATED TESTING AND QA.
10. FRONT-END WEB DEVELOPMENT.
11. BACK-END WEB DEVELOPMENT.
12. SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE.
13. DEVELOPMENT OPERATIONS.
14. CMS SYSTEMS.
Tools
Because every problem isn’t solved with a hammer
Like any trade skill, there’s the fundamentals, specializations, and last but not least the tools you use to apply those when completing a project. I’ve used many many tools and have grow a fondness for some. Tooling and utilities have become one of my latest affinities since things like dotfiles can exponentially increase an engineering teams’ scope and efficiency. Below is a list of tools that I prefer both at work and on personal projects.
Platforms
Mac OSX, Docker Containers (Unix), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Azure B2C, Zoho Tool Suite, Github Enterprise, Sentry Reporting, Zendesk Enterprise
Articles
Sharing my lessons learned.
As I have progressed and changed throughout my career, I’ve had many achievements, discovered tactics, and developed strategies which have helped me and those around me. Many of these came from countless hours of experimenting and research. Others came from endless failures and mistakes I’ve made. One of my core leadership matras is building a team culture where “Growth from Mistakes” is embraced. These articles celebrate many of those and outline standards and opinionated best practices within the industry.
Contact
LET’S GET IN TOUCH.
I would love to connect! One of the most fulfilling aspects of my career is when I can leverage my expertise and experience to have a positive impact. Whether you need a freelancer on a new project, are considering joining the industry, or have an opportunity to begin a new chapter. I get excited when the mission matters. Let’s start the conversation!