Welcome

I’m Andrew Horner.

I imagine, write, design, and develop — not in any particular order, and often all at once.

I believe that showing is always better than telling, and I believe that good code and good design should speak for themselves.

That’s why I’ve published the source for this résumé (there’s a link in the footer).

Work

Wowzers
Wowzers
rails
full-time
Wowzers is a pretty cool little company that focuses on a full-fledged curriculum for children rooted in games and virtual interaction. While I was there, my primary focus was on data visualization and user interface construction for all of the requisite non-student parties involved in the education process. My work was almost exclusively in the Ruby on Rails framework. I could blather on for a few more paragraphs about the different gems, language abstractions and techniques I used, but nobody wants to read all of that -- suffice it to say, I used all of the stuff you should be using if you're building a Rails app.
Nym
Nail Your Mortgage
rails
full-time
Nail Your Mortgage was a small, agile tech start-up in the massive, relatively luddite industry of mortgage lending. I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed developer, eager to take the plunge into something much bigger than myself. And plunge I did, garnering a year and a half of experience as a Ruby on Rails developer, as well as adding to my already extensive front-end experience with HTML, CSS and Javascript (jQuery in particular). The project was an all-encompassing mortgage hub spanning the entire mortgage transaction, from setting up rates and applying fee adjustments to notifying customers about the minute-by-minute status of their loan applications, handling credit card payments and managing an online document repository chock-full of sensitive information. Every day I spent here was another exercise in ironing out the complicated mess of the mortgage industry, and I like to think I did a pretty good job on my end of transforming a traditionally frustrating and confusing process into an intuitive user experience. I loved every minute of it.
Cernium
Cernium Corporation
flash
contract
I serviced a month-long contract with Cernium, using Flex and ActionScript to develop a video player front-end to merge seamlessly with their existing consumer site and present the video footage stored on their servers. I was responsible for designing and implementing the interface, creating and packaging all the graphics, and iterating through feedback cycles with their quality assurance and user feedback teams. The end result was a finished product, an alien, possibly meaningless concept in the world of agile development, yet something I could be proud of just out of college with limited real-world development experience.

Education

Ucf
University of Central Florida
higher
computer science
digital media
I started my college years as a Computer Science major at the University of Central Florida, a choice which lasted for two years -- long enough to earn all of the credits required for a minor in the subject. After those two years, I decided I was more interested in finding a practical application for all the Computer Science theory I had learned, and made the transition over to the Digital Media department. So it was that in my final years of college, I focused on user experience/interaction, visual storytelling, and web and game design -- a collection of ideas and principles that would serve me well in my future as a web developer.
Stanton
Stanton College Preparatory
secondary
computer science
In my time at Stanton College Preparatory, I was awarded a diploma by the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO), placed in the top 5% of my class, was recognized as a National Merit Scholar, and was a member of the National Honor Society. In 2005 (the year I graduated), Stanton was recognized as #3 in Newsweek's 100 Best High Schools in America. My elective coursework focused on Computer Science and Object-Oriented Programming.