Andrew Ash
Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir Technologies
Burlingame, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAndrew Ash is a Forward Deployed Engineer with 15 years of experience building scalable, production-grade systems across security-sensitive domains like banking fraud, malware, and counterterrorism. Currently at Palantir after a stint at Google where he reduced infrastructure cost-per-user for Google Photos, he blends hands-on backend engineering with product-focused deployment and data integration work. His open-source contributions span heavy-hitter projects such as Apache Spark—where he fixed race conditions and memory issues—and utility libraries like super-csv, reflecting a pragmatic focus on reliability and performance. Comfortable across distributed databases, search layers, and large-scale data processing, he thrives on tightening system invariants and preventing production failures. Based in Burlingame, CA, he pairs a Georgia Tech CS background with a history of teaching and early entrepreneurial CTO experience, signaling both technical depth and operational leadership.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Computer Science, B.S., Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology
Stackoverflow
3,292reputation
122kreached
35answers
3questions
keyboard-shortcuts
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ubuntu
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eclipse
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linux
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python
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django
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Github Skills (31)
unit-testing10
debug10
csv-parse10
spark10
big-data10
java10
scala10
javas10
csv-parsing10
ubuntu9
keyboard-shortcuts9
strings9
debugging9
python9
django9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
super-csv/super-csv
May 2016 - Sep 2016
A fast, programmer-friendly, free CSV library for Java
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:20 commits, 2 PRs, 38 comments in 3 months
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily focused on improving the `super-csv` library by addressing several issues related to CSV parsing and encoding. Their contributions included fixing a typo, adding a new preference for escaping quotes with a backslash character, and implementing corresponding changes to the `Tokenizer` and `DefaultCsvEncoder` classes to support the new feature. The user also added comprehensive unit tests to validate the new functionality. Furthermore, they also updated the javadoc and added checks to ensure code quality.
csvcsv-readercsv-parserjavacsv-library
apache/spark
Jan 2017 - Oct 2017
Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 20 PRs, 132 comments in 9 months
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily contributes to bug fixes, minor feature enhancements, and code improvements within the Apache Spark project. Their work includes correcting typos, refining logging messages, addressing potential issues related to memory management, and improving the user interface's presentation of data. Furthermore, the user is involved in optimizing the take() method to prevent potential out-of-memory errors, and fixing race conditions during task serialization. These contributions indicate a focus on enhancing the reliability and efficiency of the Spark framework.
analyticspythondata-processingsqlapache
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