Houston, TX · Senior full-stack · devops
AndrewR.
Every one I’ve earned
12 years, in order. Pick a sticker and it tells you what actually happened.
A CS degree I'd already outrun
Computer Science at University of Houston Downtown. I was freelancing before I finished, which is the half that actually taught me — the degree mostly confirmed things I had been guessing at for three years.
The tool cost money, so I wrote one
Rizz It was a C# screen-capture uploader that pushed to a remote server and handed back an instant shareable link, no account required. It was the first thing I ran as a service rather than shipped as a file, and it set the pattern for everything after.
Matchmaking with nobody at the wheel
At Victorious Gaming I built a proprietary tournament engine that paired players and ran participation automatically. When it stopped scaling I rebuilt the platform on Zend 2, and kept the whole thing — tournaments, Teamspeak, the lot — up around the clock.
Running something people are actively competing on teaches you about uptime faster than any postmortem.
Fifty-plus clients, one lesson
Upwork, full-time, for four years. Industrial parts management backends, PHP sites kept alive and compliant, Node automation bots. Everything from a weekend fix to a system somebody’s business ran on.
The lesson was scoping. Quote before you understand the problem and you pay for it yourself — usually twice.
Seven years, one product
NetActuate, junior through senior. I built and owned the interface people used to manage and monitor bare-metal servers — Nuxt on the front, a Laravel API behind it — and the Docker and AWS pipeline that shipped it. Before that I converted their PHP/Smarty app into a Vue SPA and wrote a Node scraper that collected millions of route-view data points into MongoDB.
I also led a small team through it. Seven years on one product instead of seven logos in five years: you learn things in year five that year one cannot teach you.
Let the customer define the schema
CertiPath wanted end users to modify anything about their own software, so I built a modular field and forms system where fields and options were defined by configuration rather than code, on a database schema built to carry it.
I also chased down a leak that only surfaced after about two weeks of continuous runtime, which is the least fun kind of bug there is.
Now I automate myself
forge-flow is my own deploy and content infrastructure, and it runs this site end to end. Publishing a post here used to need a rebuild and a redeploy; now it is a database write and a cache purge.
If I do something twice by hand, it becomes a script.
The sticker pack
118 skills on file. Here are the ones I’d actually put on a laptop.
Languages
Frameworks
Infrastructure
Data & testing
The one that matters
Andrew R. · Houston, TX · rizz.dev