Hello! I'm Andrew, a native of Seattle currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am a software engineer as well as a computer science student. I aim to design systems that are secure, performant, and intuitive for both users and engineers, and I'm interested in studying how we can make that easy to do, both through languages and tooling and through CS education.
I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2017 with a BS in Computer Science. I spent two years in the software industry before returning to school to pursue my interests in CS education. Currently, I am a third-year MS student studying computer science at Stanford University.
In the Spring 2022 quarter at Stanford, I am teaching CS 107A, the ACE section for CS 107, and CS 9, a course on the SWE interview process. In previous quarters, I've taught CS 107A, CS 107, and CS 9, and CAed for CS 107 and CS 110. At Carnegie Mellon, I was a TA for a variety of courses including theoretical computer science (15-251), discrete mathematics (15-151), practical UNIX (15-131), data structures and C programming (15-122), and intro programming (15-112).
I work at Google as a senior software engineer developing the front-end of the Google homepage and searchbox. (Before you ask, those weird suggestions you see come from real people, and no, I don't really do much machine learning in my work.) Unfortunately it's my policy not to write referrals when asked, so I politely decline such requests. In the past, I interned at Facebook, Microsoft, and a small SF-based startup.
Opinions are my own and don't represent my employer or anyone else. In that vein: Spaces are better than tabs. Vim is better than emacs. Firefox is just as good as Chrome, and is better for the web ecosystem (although my colleagues working on Chrome are talented and well-intentioned). Linux is great, but isn't for everybody, and that's okay.
If you want to contact me, my Stanford username is adbenson, and I'm confident you can put together the email address from there. Or if you know me in real life, you can use those channels too.