rubenwardy

Software Engineer and Open Source Maintainer

male United Kingdom

Hi, I'm Andrew Ward

I’m a software developer, an open source contributor, and a graduate from the University of Bristol. I’m a core developer for Luanti, an open source voxel game engine.

I have a diverse range of interests, both technical and non-technical. Some examples include User Interfaces / User Experience, game dev, electronics, and physics.

Projects

General Software

Games and Graphics

Electronics

Talks and Conferences

Luanti

Blog

I post in-depth tutorials and articles on my projects on my blog around once a month. See below for the most recent posts.

See more

Experience

  • Senior Software Engineer Jun 2022 - Present

    Working on an Android app with a large userbase. The app uses legacy Java; we’re working on bringing new features to users and refactoring the app to use the latest best practices (Kotlin, Jetpack, etc).

    Reduced risk by pioneering a new API that sits between the apps and upstream sources. This allows the team to implement logic once, perform validation, and quickly release hotfixes to the data without needing all users to update. Also introduced a daily CI job that validates that the production and staging environments are running correctly.

    Identified, proposed, and implemented the fix for a significant UX pain point, increasing discoverability of an essential feature from a success rate of 26% to 92%.

    Identified a significant performance issue when opening part of the app. Implemented the fix, resulting in a reduction of opening time from 0.98s to 0.37s.

  • Capgemini Engineering

    Software Engineer Sep 2019 - May 2022

    Worked on an analysis tool for the rail industry, using React and TypeScript.

    Worked on infrastructure for running physics calculations in the cloud, using Python, Flask, Celery, OpenShift/Kubernetes, MongoDB, and Docker.

    Worked on jet engine noise prediction software and deskop GUI applications, written in C# WPF and Java Swing.

    Provided mentorship and training for junior developers and apprentices, one of which was a client.

    Increased team productivity by pioneering an automated Jenkins CI pipeline to run unit and UI tests. This freed developers up for 15 minutes each invocation, resulting in team savings of more than an hour per day.

    Commended for the ability to quickly ramp up on new projects, and efficiency in producing work.

    Participated in agile / scrum development with daily stand-ups and planned sprints, and performed test driven development and peer code review.

  • Arm

    Linux Kernel and Android Intern Jun - Aug 2018

    As part of a Research and Development team, I worked on experimental changes to the Linux kernel to improve memory security on Android. The aim of these changes was to protect Android devices from both local and remote threats, such as malicious applications or networked actors.

    A typical task involved making changes in C and ARM Assembly to the Linux kernel, and then modifying user-space C++ tests to verify correctness.

  • GWS Media

    Android and Backend Developer Mar - Dec 2017

    I worked part time as an Android, iOS, and Backend developer for 9 months alongside my studies, gaining valuable experience in client interaction and agile development. I worked on a number of different projects, both individually and as part of a team. I took pride in ensuring that my work was delivered to the highest standard, following platform design guidelines and best practices.

  • CERN

    Collaborator Jul 2019 - Dec 2019

    Worked on Craft the Web, a game to teach young people about the origins of the world wide web.

    Guest speaker at CERN during the Codez la Science conference (slides).

  • Luanti (previously Minetest)

    Core Developer and Contributor Aug 2012 - Present

    Luanti is an open-source voxel game engine, which I am a maintainer for. I regularly review pull requests and have contributed a lot of things including:

    • An in-menu installer and package manager, and a backend for it called ContentDB.
    • The Minetest Modding Book.
    • Lua assertation and integration testing framework, to improve quality assurance and prevent regressions.
    • Assorted GUI features, including styling and a shared inventory GUI library.

    I’ve also created a number of third-party projects, including an Android app to install mods, a 3d voxel modelling program, and lots of games and mods.

    I attended as an official exhibitor at both Freenode Live conferences, in 2017 and 2018.

    Participating in this project has given me a proficiency in Git, Linux, and collaboration.

Skills

Here is a selection of things I've had experience with.

Want to see more?

Take a look at my blog, Mastodon, Github, or YouTube accounts.