Aaron T Harris
Expect to find incomplete projects and experiments touching on some of my favorite topics: Computer Graphics, OpenGL, Unity and other flavors usually for the sake of gaming. You'll likely find less of some of my other favorite topics since all the REALLY good stuff is private and due to professional conflict of interest with my Corporate Mothership: Mobile, Android, iOS, Rest-like services. If I have a choice, most code will be in the form of C, C++, Java, or C#, but you'll probably run into some naughtier skills such as Perl, Bash, Javascript and the like.
Est. 1979: Chronological
I am an engineer, a scientist and a nerd.
I am a gamer.
I am a photographer.
I am a husband.
I am a father (as of Feb 29, 2016).
I have an Art Degree, not a CS Degree. You see, I wanted to be a photographer...
I minored in Computer Science and eventually took every upper division CS Course available -- I still do not have a CS Degree as I never completed Calc II-IV.
Why does that matter? Because it is art that makes me a great engineer. More important than code, is abstract thought, balance, symmetry, flow, comprehension and expression. What good is code, if it is not creative?
I am a Certified Professional Photographer certified by NYIP.
I am a Principal Software Engineer and Architect having worked at various startups, Yahoo and Facebook
Above all else I consider my greatest strength to be creativity and critical thinking, but we can all claim that so lets just factor those out.
Professionally I have focused on Android almost exclusively since I discovered it in 2008.
However APIs change and knowledge expires, so I'll never claim to be an expert and settle for "knowledgeable".
I consider my expertise to be in Application Design, which lends itself well to Mobile Development.
Strengths that make me a good engineer...
Finding ways to apply real science to daily life at work. Stabilizing mobile often relies on heavy telemetry from beta/production since you can't truly test on all devices and environments to prove something stable.
Instead we do our research and form a hypothesis, code an experimental solution with proper analytics and error reporting, follow up post-release to analyze the data. Yeah Science!
I believe code is one of my strengths but code is also very subjective. I claim my code is clean, efficient and stable, but don't we all?
I claim my code has the proper balance of overengineered futureproofing, abstractions for expandability and properly called out // FIXMEs and // TECHDEBT, but don't we all?
Nevermind then with the code, I can claim it no more a strength than anyone else on a resume, you'll just need to see for yourself. PS - Please don't judge me my personal github projects :)
Instead I'll just say, I enjoy mentoring others. I enjoy driving best practices, design reviews, code reviews. I enjoy having others poke holes in my ideas if only to help patch the holes again for the chance at achieving an unsinkable ship.
Mobile mentality
Users first mentality
Shipping code.
Facebook (Meta) 2017 - 2023: Principal / Staff / E6 Software Engineer
Vevo 2016 - 2017: Engineering Manager & Architect
Yahoo Sports (Formerly Sportacular) 2007 - 2016: Sr. Principal Engineer
I lead development for Yahoo Sports - Android
I give tech talks, I run sprint planning, I hold design reviews, whiteboard sessions, push back against bad requirements, attempt to steer the future.
// TODO: insert my past employment AKA long list of startups and dotcoms 1996 - 2007... :/
It was always about gaming until mobile became a thing, then it was about Gaming & Mobile.
It started in 1985 with hangman poorly copied from my computer manual written in Tandy Basic on my TRS-80 CoCo II.
Soon came poor examples of BBS door games, largely influenced by Scott Baker's LOD.
Even poorer attempts to write modern OpenGL clones of my favorite game of all time Starflight.
I began mobile development ~1998 with Palm OS and took a similar interest in
BREW, STM32, 8051, Arduino until I found iOS and Android in 2008 and have been doing Android and iOS (mostly Android) ever since.
The gaming development continues:
My only public release: Minecart Zombies
Private ongoings hidden in github: A fantasy sidescroller built in Unity and yet another Minecraft clone to the flavor of LOD.
aarontharris@gmail.com
Please don't contact me about job offers, I'm not interested.
Questions, comments, hate-mail is all welcome :)