About Andy Hopper

Andy has been writing software for the past 15 years, specializing in Enterprise application development for the Windows platform. He especially loves writing tools for other developers as he considers them to be the most challenging customer: "Developers LOVE to complain. If they like your tool, you've hit a home run." Andy got his start in 1984 when he received a Commodore VIC-20 for his birthday. After dabbling in Microsoft Basic he soon realized that one could, in fact, fill 2k of RAM quite quickly and so moved on to writing Z80 assembly code. Things went rapidly downhill from there. Andy enrolled at Georgia Tech and obtained a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, meanwhile gazing longingly at the shiny new "protected mode" everyone was talking about. While studying for his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Miami, Andy realized that his one true calling was software development. To his family's great dismay, he dropped out of the PhD program and went to work for Georgia Tech Research Corporation writing software for an exciting telemedicine application. Since then, he has worked for research institutions, startup companies and even a few years at Microsoft before finally coming to his home at Wintellect. On working at Microsoft, Andy has this to say: "Oddly enough, it's remarkably similar to life at a startup. Sure, everyone's working for the same company, but many groups are small, aggressive teams that are allowed to make their own decisions. Where startups have to report to the VCs to keep receiving funding, the product teams need to report to executive management. If you're not producing the goods, you get shut down. I've even been on a team that was 'acquired' by another team because they wanted the product. People who say Microsoft has become slow and lazy are ill-informed - it's actually buzzing with activity. To see that, all one need do is look at the steady stream of new technologies they are producing." Andy lives in Atlanta with his wife and children. When not surgically attached to a laptop, Andy enjoys performing minor surgery on electronics, rewiring his home (after all, one can never have enough Ethernet jacks), and even occasionally venturing outside to marvel at the Day Star.

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