Matt Andrews

About me

I'm an engineering manager, a writer, a tired dad and a cyclist. I've worked at the Economist, the National Lottery Community Fund, the BBC and the Guardian. When I'm not writing code I can be found riding my bike, brewing beer, playing boardgames or writing things. Feel free to drop me a line at matt@mattandrews.info.

I write a weekly newsletter called "Man Feelings" which you can subscribe to here, and I write a parenting blog called Yawn Of The Dad where I share lessons learned being a dad.

Links

My writing View all

Things I learned managing people in 2023

blogpost 20 Dec 2023

I wrote last year about things I learned as an engineering manager in 2022. It’s been another twelve months of ups, downs and sideways, so here’s a couple more things that I learned this year about leading people in tech. Let good people go A... keep reading

Things I learned managing people in 2022

blogpost 04 Jan 2023

The past two years of my engineering management career have been both fulfilling and challenging, particularly in the first half of the period as I rebuilt my self-confidence after a difficult previous role, and sought to define what my role actually was in the absence... keep reading

International Women's Day 2018

blogpost 08 Mar 2018

I’m fortunate to have worked with, been inspired by and be aware of a whole bunch of incredible women. While I’m firmly in agreement with Rachel Coldicutt about how women “shouldn’t need a special day to get public visibility”, I’d also like to highlight (in... keep reading

On being #woke (or: privilege, minorities and ignorance)

blogpost 06 Feb 2018

I’ve experienced being a minority twice in my life. The first time was in 2014 (when I was 27) at a Guardian event featuring Sheryl Sandberg promoting her “Lean In” book. My girlfriend bought me a ticket and I attended in solidarity despite not being... keep reading

Buying a house

blogpost 24 Jan 2018

We left London in 2015 because getting on the housing ladder seemed impossible. Our landlord in our small 1-bedroom flat in zone 3 offered us “first refusal” on the place he was kicking us out of to sell – £370k. We refused. Birmingham was a... keep reading

Things I've learned organising events

blogpost 08 Aug 2017

I’ve been running a regular music meetup event for over two years now, across two cities (London and Birmingham). While it’s a small event and a bit specialist/niche, I’ve learned a thing or two while running it and thought I’d share some learnings here. Put... keep reading

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My talks and presentations View all

Making Desktop Apps With Electron

Building applications using JavaScript Hydrahack Birmingham • 13 Mar 2017

If you've not already heard of Electron, it's effectively a bundled up browser which has access to the wider filesystem than a regular browser. Electron lets you write an app for multiple desktop platforms in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Why You Should Quit Your Job

Lessons learned in job satisfaction Ignite Brum • 01 Jun 2016

From 2010-2015 I worked at the Guardian newspaper as a client-side web developer. I started working there at the age of 23 and it was my dream job. I want to talk about realising when you're unhappy at work and what to do about it when it happens to you.

The Blossoming of the Web

New technologies and digital journalism Hacks & Hackers Birmingham • 23 Nov 2015

This talk is mixed bag of new(ish) developments in technology which intersect with journalism. I'm going to talk through six examples of things that I think are interesting that you should care about if you're a hack, a hacker, or that semi-mythical unicorn who claims to be both.

Where Is Everybody?

Fermi's Paradox Guardian Ignite • 24 Jan 2015

This talk, much indebted to the fantastic article by Wait But Why, offers an introduction to the question: where is everyone? If the universe is full of potential life-supporting planets, why haven't we met anyone? Let's find out... in five minutes.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea

AKA the Hermit Kingdom Guardian Ignite • 05 Nov 2014

This was a talk for an internal Guardian event where I spoke about the much-discussed "hermit kingdom" of North Korea, and shone a little light on the background, the history, the culture... and the snacks.

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My portfolio View all

Rhubarb Crumble

An Electron-powered desktop app, this wraps a command line tool for generating mouth shapes from audio files and animates them using images of lips. This was for a BBC Digital Guerrillas project to output quick animated video without manual lipsyncing work.

YouTube Dubber

Another fun BBC Digital Guerrillas hack, this simple app lets you take the audio from one YouTube video and add it to the video from another. Hours of stupid, silly entertainment.

Snow Messages

A silly hack for a Christmas house party, this was running on our TV while we had a houseful of friends, showing their festive messages as they added them to the list. I accept no responsibility for their messages' content.

SofaSync

This was sadly never launched, but it was a fully-featured realtime chat/video app, using BBC iPlayer programme data to provide a synchronised chat room where remote friends could watch a show together, pause/play/skip at the same time, and sent text/emoji reactions.

Gygax

This is a work-in-progress webapp, built to aid my Dungeons & Dragons sessions with friends. While there are plenty of D&D apps out there, most are either too ugly or too advanced for my usage, so I built this one to solve a few things.

Mates vs Monsters

A much-revised Twitter-based game, masterminded by my friend and colleague Joseph Bell and built to allow you to choose your friends (using Twitter's API), enter a dungeon with them and battle monsters and answer questions about them. A BBC Digital Guerrillas project.

What is That?

A BBC Science project which showed a variety of microscope images where users had to guess what they were seeing. I built two interfaces: the rotating desktop one and a mobile carousel version, as well as an AngularJS-powered quiz.

Thirteen: Find the Girl

Another BBC Digital Guerrillas project, this featured half a dozen websites including computer hacking games, in-browser image editors, blogs, laptop tracking websites and more – all to support BBC Three's well-received Thirteen show in 2016.

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My teaching

Building websites using HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Guardian Masterclasses

I taught this class for several years for attendees on the Guardian's Masterclass brand. Over the four week evening class I covered the basics of the "holy trinity" of web design, and was proud to see a number of students later pick up careers in the web development industry.

Dates taught

21 November 2012 – 13 December 2012 • 27 February 2013 – 20 March 2013 • 4 June 2013 – 25 June 2013 • 24 September 2013 – 15 October 2013 • 15 January 2014 – 5 February 2014 • 6 March 2014 – 27 March 2014 • 16 April 2014 – 7 May 2014 • 3 September 2014 – 24 September 2014

How to be a digital journalist

Guardian Masterclasses

I was part of a series of tutors teaching audiences as diverse as lecturers, academics, student/graduates, and (in one case) the sports journalists from Italy's La Gazzetta dello Sport about the basics of digital journalism, including software, Agile and what developers do all day.

Dates taught

12 January 2013 – 13 January 2013 • 23 March 2013 – 24 March 2013 • 25 February 2014 – 18 March 2014

How web developers work... and what they wish you knew

Guardian Masterclasses

This lecture-style class was given to an audience of attendees wanting to know more about the folks with headphones and expensive-looking coffees increasingly littering their offices – how to work with them, understand them and get the best out of them.

Dates taught

22 July 2013 • 28 April 2014

Coding For The Web 101

The Birmingham and Midland Institute

This brand-new four week evening class covered the basics of the "holy trinity" of web design. I relocated to Birmingham and relaunched my teaching here, covering HTML, CSS and JavaScript and offering a cheap and well-structured introducing to the basics of coding.

Dates taught

18 February 2016 – 17 March 2016