Andrew Geiger

Background

About Andrew Geiger

I like fixing things and fighting against the natural decay due to systemantics. Usually, this comes down to tool building, and often on a shoestring budget. Ideally, more budget is better, but solving a problem with Legos and a roll of Kapton is fun (and surprisingly effective). Other times it means perpetrating acts of technical shenanigans with self-coding Excel, bootstrapping web servers without escalation, or putting pen-cams in the (simulated) final frontier. Note that I document and justify my work/hacks and I am careful to prepare for unexpected or undesired side effects.(With the one unregrettable exception that one time I DDOS'd a co-op using Lync, which I still contend was an accident, no matter how hilarious it was.) Despite initial impressions, I am strongly pragmatic. Things break, wrong things are set up for good reasons, and often machines operate perpetually in failure modes. My specialty is finding out why something went wrong, why it may not *actually* went wrong, and what to do (or not do) about it. I'll usually call this 'Troubleshooting'​, but it's more strongly akin to simple empathy for the machine and operators. I've seen some astonishing failures, but almost always it's simply the earnest effort of well-meaning people or machines dealing with too little information and too much pressure. I like to alleviate that stress for people, if only a little- For the sake of pigeonholing, these two popular sorters bucket me as: KTS II - INTP “Architect” - Rational StrengthsFinder 2.0 - Strategic, Learner, Ideation, Self-Assurance, Command - My long-term goals involve bolting a heuristics engine to a production line, hopefully providing an answer to the time-worn question "why didn't anybody notice [obscure PLC tag] went awry?" Modern production lines are immensely complex, and old production lines using modern equipment doubly so; I want to help those machines. And - if possible - make one.