Portland, Oregon

Andi Wilson

Frontend engineer. I think a lot about engineers, the culture we build around them, and the leadership that takes both seriously.

I have been writing software for a couple of decades. My formal training is in electrical engineering, undergrad and grad, and I am wrapping up a masters in engineering and technology management in a few weeks.

What I keep coming back to is the people who do this work. The engineers, the teams they live inside, the culture we put around them, and the leaders who shape that culture. Leadership gets less serious attention than it deserves and I would like to help change that.

This is where I plan to post some of what I have built and, eventually, some of what I think.

Selected work

GameDock

2012 Hardware and firmware

A Kickstarter-funded console that turned an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad into a TV-connected game system.

GameDock was a small console you docked an iOS device into. It connected to a TV over HDMI, ran iCade-compatible games and titles built specifically for it, and used a pair of NES-style USB controllers. I designed the hardware and wrote the firmware, and I learned more about manufacturing in those few months than I had in years of school.

We funded on Kickstarter and ended up doing a production run of over five hundred units. That meant sourcing components out of Shenzhen, working through assembly issues at three in the morning Pacific time, and making honest design tradeoffs against a price target that did not move. The press was generous to us. IGN, The Verge, and Ars Technica all covered it, which helped backers find us and which I still appreciate years later.

It is the project I bring up when I want to remind myself that hardware is humbling, and that shipping a real product to real people is one of the better teachers a young engineer can find.

medmap.io

2015

A map of every medical residency and fellowship program in the United States.

My wife was applying to pediatric residencies and we kept running into the same problem. We knew programs by name and reputation but we had no real sense of where any of them sat on a map. We are an outdoorsy family. We wanted to know which programs were near mountains, which ones had a coast nearby, which ones were a long drive from anything green.

So one weekend I plotted every pediatric residency in the country. The picture surprised both of us. The east and northeast were dense in a way the rankings never made obvious, and whole regions of the country had almost nothing.

I posted the map for friends in her cohort and word spread. People started asking for other specialties. I added them one at a time until I had mapped every accredited residency and fellowship program in the country. It is still up and still used, and it is one of the projects I am most proud of because it started with a real problem and a real family decision.