We snapped Andrew up straight out of university after he graduated with a Bachelor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences with Honours.
That was way back in 2011. Now he’s considered a very important part of the furniture.
Andrew is skilled in customizing digital collections so that each client’s website can reflect their unique branding and style. He maintains a number of our key digital collections, adding new features and ingesting new data as they grow.
How do you like working at Veridian?
Working here is great. Especially the friendly co-workers and flexible atmosphere.
If you hadn't ended up in software development, what would you be doing?
It’s difficult to say, most of my other job preferences were in software development, such as creating computer models. If I wasn’t in software development, I’d probably be working in a pure maths field.
What do you do to relax?
I love playing computer games (in particular strategy games which make you think, or online card games), and watching sci-fi movies.
Tell us about a digital collection you’re working on at the moment.
I work with many different collections. Currently most of my work is with managing and organising data within the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection or the California Digital Newspaper Collection. We’re identifying duplicated data, or data that might’ve been mis-named or processed multiple times. This is a very careful process that requires lots of communication with the client.
Having clean and tidy data is critical for efficiently managing a Veridian collection. Collections hosted by us are always properly backed up, but backups are designed to be ‘worst-case’ scenarios, so before deleting any data in a collection we’re always very careful to ask the client to make sure that they don’t want to ever use it. It slows down the process, but ensures maximum data integrity.
Is there a Veridian feature that stands out for you?
While User Text Correction is the most unique feature, the one that stands out for me is the customizability of user accounts (a particularly obscure feature). With some time spent in development, any Veridian collection can be customized to allow access to a section of documents, or restrict certain actions to certain groups (such as allowing users to download PDFs only if they belong to a certain user group), or even restrict documents by IP range. It’s quite extensible and amazingly flexible.
What's your favourite place in the world?
I haven’t travelled much, but have always wanted to visit a huge English-speaking city like New York or London some time in the future.