Hi, I'm Andrew Robilliard. Originally from Canada, I've now been in New Zealand for a lot longer than seems possible. Currently, I'm in my final year of a Bachelor of Science at the University of Auckland, majoring in Computer Science and Information Systems.
From Jan. 2018, I am excited to be starting as a Graduate Developer at Intergen.
When I'm not buried in assignments, you can often find me trying to learn something I've managed to find on the Internet. Who knows, it might be helpful one day! After a few technical assessments on HackerRank, I became pretty enamoured with using it to touch up on my Java and SQL skills. I also consider myself to be a bit of a movie buff, so if I'm missing during film festival season, you know why. When I get tired of being indoors, I might be out running, or maybe even snowboarding at Mt. Ruapehu if I've managed to drag someone along.
So, why did I choose technology? I took Computer Science throughout high school, starting right from year 9. However, in those early years, I have to admit it wasn't that exciting. Building basic programs in Scratch and writing some HTML just wasn't challenging for me, and I always preferred pulling out a calculator to a keyboard. It wasn't until year 12 when I entered the Bay of Plenty Mashup competition that I realised my passion for IT. This event was my first experience with business analysis, stakeholder elicitation, and an array of other ideas that would later become an integral part of my Information Systems major. That weekend opened my eyes and allowed me to realise the extent to which technology can be implemented to complete real, meaningful problems and it was a turning point for me. Luckily, that project managed to be archived on my high school server before I left for university. It's interesting for me to look back on and see where my journey started.
So that was high school, what's happened since I got to university? Course work has kept me pretty busy, and coding that I do is often either directly related to an assignment or written to enhance my knowledge of a class. Examples of each are held on my GitHub, which I'm currently using as a bit of a glorified portfolio. Apart from this code, which is primarily written in Java, you can also find a few business documents produced as part of Information Systems. This variety of tasks was something I've enjoyed while at university, and I think it allowed me to obtain a good balance between technical CS skills and more communication-oriented business ones. Within my majors, I've chosen courses to tailor my skills and define myself from the pack. These include:
- Networking - TCP/IP Stack
- Java and Python Programming
- SQL and T-SQL
- Database Management - Particularly Data Warehousing
- Data Science and Data Analytics
- Computer Graphics and Image Processing