Hi!

My name is Andy and I am a maker. Enough about me. How are you? What did you have for lunch yesterday? Have you made anything cool lately?

OK, back to me: I like to make things, with or without purpose. Metal stuff, wood stuff, wood and metal stuff, shelves, machines that turn themselves off, homemade circuit boards, etc. I love to learn how to manufacture stuff myself. I’d rather make it if I need it. I also love to take things apart to see how real-world products are engineered.

I have a wonderful and beautiful wife who is VERY tolerant of my endless tinkering. She may roll her eyes when I run out of the workshop yellimg, “Honey! Look at this thing that does blah blah blah!” She doesn’t always encourage it, per se, mostly for safety reasons, but I’m pretty sure it has some entertainment value for her and she does brag to her girlfriends about how handy I can be. #winning #loved

I have a silly daughter. Where the silly came from I have no idea. Yes I do. #BestDajerEvvar

I love to work with my hands and I will at least attempt to make something myself if I think I have any chance of making it nice and usable. Heck, I’ll try it regardless. If it doesn’t turn out, lesson learned.

I love electronics. It’s super cool to build your own electronic gadgets. Learning to build your own circuits, circuit boards, gadgets that use microcontrollers… Pretty much anything you can purchase from Mouser.com, Digikey.com, Adafruit.com, SparkFun.com, JameCo.com or Newark.com is fair game for integrating into something fun or useful. I’ve been doing that since forever, but really started to dig deep into it around 2009, including producing my own PCBs with the photoresist method. But, with OSH Park, it’s affordable and easy to just have them make you a really nice board, if you can wait a few days.

In the 1980s, I learned C programming in high school (on my own, since programming courses were pretty much non-existent at that level at that time). While I worked at a computer store in college, I stepped up to C++, thanks to one of the techs who used to burn the BIOS EPROMs for our own brand of computers. I wrote programs in C and C++ on early Linux distributions in the 1990's and early 2000's, which helped keep my skills up-to-date, thankfully. I have put that experience to good use on the Atmel chips I use all over my projects. This experience would ultimately make it easy for my work on iOS and Mac apps.

I learned TIG welding first on aluminum at Local Motors while they helped build the chassis for the Office Chairiot. I received an auto-dimming helmet and gloves as a gift from my wife. I am now a proud owner of a Lincoln Square Wave TIG 200 and a Lincoln Power MIG 210 MP. I wish I’d gotten into metalworking and welding sooner, but happy I took the plunge, regardless. Sticking metal together with electricity is AWESOME!!

By day, I am the “People Whisperer” for Evoke Melt in Tempe, AZ. Evoke Melt is a digital marketing partner for companies in the pharma and biotech industries. That means we design and build marketing websites, emails, banners, set up analytics and help clients interpret the data, build custom software solutions, but we’re especially versed in how to do that stuff efficiently and effectively for the aforementioned industries. We know the world of pharma and biotech and how to navigate through it. The Melt office is fuh-fuh-fun and inspires HUGE sums of creativity. It may be hard to believe, but the original partners of Evoke Melt (then “meltmedia”) encouraged me to build the “Office Chairiot™,” request that I come up with a bathroom busy status system which gave us “iPotti™,” and they LOVED when I gave them a custom “useless machine ever” (the “UME Mark II™”) for their 10th anniversary.

I’ve been in Information Technology for almost 40 years in roles ranging from Network Engineer to Software Engineer to CEO/Owner. I’ve always been entrepreneurial, but as I’ve gotten older, I’m more analytical about risky moves, of course. That bug never goes away, which is cool. Throughout my career, I’ve flip-flopped from software to hardware because I love them both. I’m as comfortable at the command line in Unix as I am connecting routers and switches in a 19-inch rack. I can even terminate fiber optic cable (whether or not that cable would be operable in production environment is another story). I’ve been writing custom macOS and iOS software since about 2011 (my first Apple World Wide Developer Conference). LOVE the Swift programming language. I use it now for command-line utilities and scripting, as well as server stuff (API servers for my projects, for instance).

Executive Summary: I pretty much tinker in many things.

Please feel free to interact. Leave me comment or questions. Free exchange of ideas is GOOD.