I’m Andy Jeffrey. I live in Portland Oregon, where I design and build applications.

TL;DR · I’m a dude who started with an Architecture degree from U of O and became a coder at Intel.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a love for building things. Tinker Toys and Legos, of course. Later, a 3 story fort in our backyard built out of pilfered construction debris (good thing my mom kept my tetanus shots current). I built hundreds of model airplanes, plastic and balsa. I nearly completed the entire Guillow line by the time I graduated from high school.

Drawing was another passion. When I was in 4th grade I won an art contest. Though looking back the competition wasn’t that impressive. I was a constant doodler. My mom enrolled me in several art programs and I did very well in my high school drafting classes.

When it was time for college I thought Architecture would be the way to go and not just because it was on the first page of the college catalog (like "Weird Al" Yankovic did). I figured I could leverage my creative side and build buildings. I did well and graduated in the early nineties from U of O right smack in the middle of a recession. There were no Architecture jobs to be found, even for drawing bathroom elevations (something we joked about in Architecture studio). Soon I found an alternate job at Intel planning office space. It was hard, thankless work, but it paid the bills.

It was during my stint as a Site Planner that I discovered coding. After poring over stacks of software books I helped automate several processes using classic ASP 3.0 and then .NET when it was released. I was hooked and became a lifelong learner of everything to do with coding. As a result, I built a reputation as an effective application developer. Intel decided to make me a full time developer in 2005 and I joined a team of "embedded" IT software professionals practicing Agile. I learned a ton from those folks. We practiced Agile using pair programming, TDD, CI/CD, the works.

Today, I’m in IT Product Engineering and building elaborate cloud aware applications hosted on Azure and Intel’s internal cloud. I leverage a wide range of technologies including several open source stacks, the Microsoft stack and integrations with many enterprise solutions (SAP, Salesforce, Apigee, etc.). I can build an application from the ground up or lead a team of developers to do the same. It’s not what I majored in or expected to be doing when I was younger but now I can’t imagine doing anything else. In a way, I’m actually using my Architecture major--it’s just that I’m designing and building using ones and zeros instead of brick and mortar.