About Andrew

I started college trying to become a Mechanical and Energy engineer. I made it through the basics and all of the math (though Calc II and Differential Equations and I are still not on speaking terms) before I hit the 3000-level classes and realized two things at once: the math wasn't going to stop getting harder, and I wasn't having any fun anymore.

Then I took a class in MATLAB, and the logic just clicked. It turned out coding was already how my brain solved math problems: no skipping steps, do this, then if this do this, if that do that. Once I'd seen that, I switched to Computer Science and fell back in love with learning. One semester and a big data class later and my career path was set for me. Getting to see how companies actually wrangle enterprise-scale data was fascinating and I never really looked back.

Since 2018 I've worked across financial services, insurance, and healthcare, doing everything from deep-diving SQL layers to hunt down where bad data was sneaking in, to building PySpark pipelines in a Scrum environment, to standing up dashboards end-to-end on a three-person team where I touched every step from ingestion to the final chart. Some of it I was ready for. Plenty of it I was in over my head on, learned the hard way, and am better for.

Along the way I picked up the title of Senior Data Analyst and I've taken the "Senior" part seriously ever since. My favorite part of any job has been the moment a coworker pulls up a chair or jumps on a call and says "can you look at this with me?" I might not be the single best person in the room at any one tool, but the thing people keep telling me is that I'm good at breaking a problem down to its core and explaining it simply, and I've found that's a skill worth more than being the fastest at any one thing.

Where I'm headed: Full Stack Analyst.

In web dev there's the full-stack developer who can work the whole stack top to bottom. That's what I'm building toward on the data side. I don't want to abandon dashboards for pipelines, I want to understand the whole thing: make structurally sound decisions about how raw data gets ingested and modeled, optimize the layers underneath so a Tableau dashboard actually loads fast, and know, not just hope, that I'm following good practices instead of just the ones I reverse-engineered from crashing into a dozen projects. That's why I'm pursuing a Master's in Data Engineering: to put real fundamentals under the instincts I've already earned.

About A4. Andrew's Advanced Analytics Archive popped into my head one day, and the alliteration made sure it never took itself too seriously. It still makes me grin when I see it. This site is where I document the weird, hard-won fixes I've collected, the kind of thing you frantically google at 4:45 on a Friday, but with a little more personality than your average corporate knowledge base. If you want the buttoned-up version, that's what LinkedIn is for. If you want to see the messy parts where the real work lives, you're in the right place.