About Andrew

Heya, I'm Andrew and I'm a Mobile App Consultant currently based in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, presently working with a major Australian organisation on their mobile app. I have several topics that I am particularly interested in, including technology, road routes and navigation, politics, Australian radio and some television shows. I grew up in the suburbs of Redland City, just outside of Brisbane. I have had a mix of both public and private education for my primary and high school years and I graduated from the Queensland University of Technology with a Bachelor of Information Technology in 2014.

From a young age, I've had a strong interest in technology. When I was in primary school, I taught myself how to use and manage Windows computers by borrowing computer books from the local library and eventually became one of the 'unofficial' tech support sources at my primary school, then my high school and around the community. Because of this history, I generally use and recommend Microsoft products. I own several Windows PCs, Windows Phones, an Xbox One S and I use many Microsoft online services, such as Outlook.com, Office 365 and Groove Music. These days my main focus is on mobile computing and apps designed for phones and tablets. When prototyping or developing mobile apps, I generally choose to use C# inside of Visual Studio for Windows apps, with Xamarin used as a cross platform complimentary solution. I have also worked with Apache Cordova in the past for quickly developing cross platform mobile apps.

I have had a fairly unique interest in roads. This interest isn't in the physical road itself, but in the routes taken and associated signage and maps that have been developed. Growing up, I always was the navigator on car trips, reading the street directory (known as a Refidex where I grew up) and getting the family to the destination. I would also memorise the roads that we would drive on and then draw birds-eye view maps of them. In the last decade or so I've been mainly focused on Australia's slow change from the old American influenced route numbering systems to the European influenced alpha-numeric route numbering system.

I'm also interested in Australian radio, specifically the Australian Radio Network, Southern Cross Austereo and Grant Broadcasters. In Brisbane, I regularly listen to 97.3 FM, Triple M and River949, but I also listen to various other stations via streaming including WSFM in Sydney and Gold 104.3 in Melbourne. I've been following the trend over the last 10 years of moving away from locally produced to nationally networked content.

About This Site

There have been various incarnations of this website since 2004 when I first launched my own website (at the time, it was a free ad-supported site, hosted on Tripod). This site has been re-built from the ground up using Squarespace to replace my previous Joomla website and Wordpress blog. This new site is a combination of those existing sites and will hopefully allow me to write more content, instead of maintaining the actual sites. This site will hopefully showcase my diverse passions and for the first time, is fully mobile accessible. The predominate focus of this website will be on the technology, allowing me to share my tips, tricks and opinions, but I'll also write about my other interests along the way too!

My site is split up into three major sections, to make it easy to browse through just the content you're interested in.

  • Short Thoughts is a place where I can write short form content on a more frequent basis than the long form content I write elsewhere on my site. This content can be about any topic, depending on what I'm thinking about at the time.
  • Tech is where you can find my portfolio of work in the technology industry including my 'Tech Thoughts' blog, information on projects I'm working on and talks that I've given. My tech content has a primary but not exclusive focus on Microsoft products and services.
  • Other is funnily enough for everything else that isn't technology related! This could include anything from the alphanumeric route numbering system to radio stations.

You can comment on most posts across this website with the Disqus powered commenting system (it's free to obtain a Disqus account). I'm interested to read what you have to say, especially on some more of the niche topics. Feel free to send your questions and feedback to me via the form found on the contact page or via your favourite social media service (well one that's listed on the contact page, sorry Google+ fans).

All content and opinions on this site (and any associated social media profiles) is purely mine and is not representative of any other organisations that I may be associated with.

Credits

I'm not a particularly creative person and so the creative looking stuff on this site has probably been created by someone else with talent! I'd like you to know who they are so you can find more of their work if you like it (and even possibly buy stuff directly from them).

  • If you like my Andrew Tech Help logo that you see on this site and all across the internet, then you should visit Ashleigh Gurney's website.
  • If you like the design of the coffee cup at the top of this page, then you should visit Ninja Klee's website.