About

Passion Meets Drive

I couldn't be more grateful for the life I have and the people in it. Understanding certain parts of that are circumstance and luck, the aspects I can control are relentlessly pursued in search of perspective, wisdom, and opportunities to share that positivity with those around me.

I promise I will not link a yoga video next or write a poem. In a more pragmatic way, I'll try to describe myself. I'm Andrew Barrows. An ex-military, vocationally school trained web designer, turned front-end developer, turned full stack software engineer turned manager. I have an insatiable appetite for learning and growing both professional and personally and am assiduously loyal to those around me by practicing servantry leadership. I have a beautiful and hilarious wife as well as two amazing boys. If I'm half as lucky as I was growing up, I'll impart the 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

CORE FRONT-END WEB FUNDAMENTALS.

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.

HTML5 90%
CSS & SASS 94%
Javascript 90%
React 87%
Babel 76%
TypeScript 78%
Markdown 88%
XML 84%
UML 74%
YAML 90%
Bootstrap 88%
NodeJs 90%
Jest Unit Testing 83%
Playwright Testing 81%
JSON 92%
Python 83%
Django 68%
Svelte 73%
Next.js 88%
Java 61%
Ruby 93%
Rails 92%
PHP 80%
Bash 87%
Powershell 76%
ZSH 89%
Git 91%
MySQL 83%
Postgres 82%
Mongo DB 67%
Docker 90%
Kubernetes 88%

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 A NAIL.

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.

PHOTOSHOP 85%
ILLUSTRATOR 75%
ADOBE XD 72%
FIGMA 72%
OMNI-GRAFFLE 77%
DRAW.IO 77%
VS Code 95%
JetBrains IDEs 83%
Docker Desktop 86%
Github Codespaces 92%
K9s 85%
Github Actions 90%
Github Copilot 93%
Wordpress 91%
Outlook 365 91%
  • 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.

Being that I am still working full-time for Andrews McMeel Universal and have a family, I am currently not taking on new clients for freelance work.  I'm always open to interesting opportunities or ideas.  If you have a question or would like to reach out, feel free to submit your message below!