Originating from Vancouver Island, Andrew grew up surrounded by a untamed wilderness and lived in a mixing pot of cultures. After becoming addicted to the open source community in high school, he has remained a strong advocate ever since.

The wilderness, mix of cultures, and exposure to the open source community had something very interesting in common: Chaos. It does not always destroy, sometimes it creates previously unimaginable strength and beauty.

Now working with PingCAP to polish and refine their ambitious distributed transactional/analytical database systems, his hobby is unleashing chaos onto test clusters, tearing them apart, and making sure they come back together. With a goal to provide a bulletproof database, this is a task that simply must be done. Thankfully, he has a grand time doing it!

Having spent years teaching programming and science to young students, Andrew has hosted hundreds of hands-on workshops with up to 60 attendees. Andrew has also spoken at several meetups including one at Mozilla with 120+ attendees.

As a seasoned conference organizer and participant, Andrew has helped organize everything from 2500 person youth conferences in Northern BC, Canada down to small 200 person community technology conferences in Kyiv, Ukraine.