Who am I?

My name is Andy Wegner.

I lead, grow and mentor engineering teams in many industries. I've worked as VP of Software Engineering at a telecommunications company, Director of Engineering at a transportation logistics company and at a company working to improve the hiring process for engineers. I've been an individual contributor at a large manuafacturing company. I've built global teams of engineers and delivered solutions that impact customers worldwide. I've personally built software that covers every aspect of a product's lifecycle in multiple industries.

I am the owner of Viva Printworks (with my wife!), where we create custom designs to put on products. In the future I expect I'll have some posts here about what happens behind the scenes too, to make it successful.

I was the community owner of Team Vipers for 5 years. Vipers was a gaming community, focused mainly around Team Fortress 2, but we dabbled in other games for brief periods of time. I helped the community prosper. I also built a lot of software to help me in managing the community.

I am an elected Moderator on Stack Overflow and participate across the rest of the Stack Exchange network. I moderate Community Building and Hardware Recommendations as well. I've also built a few tools to help keep the low quality content off the Stack Exchange network.


Recent Posts

Python Gotcha: Timezone Naive Functions like utcnow() and utcfromtimestamp()

Posted on Thu 23 November 2023 in Technical Solutions • Tagged with technical

utcnow() and utcfromtimestamp() don't know about timezones and that causes problems. Let's talk about those, how to fix the problem and their recent deprecation in Python 3.12


Ruby Gotcha: Operator Precedence

Posted on Mon 23 October 2023 in Technical Solutions • Tagged with technical

In Ruby you can use either and or &&. You can use or or ||. What's is the difference and what's the catch?


Python Gotcha: Comparisons

Posted on Wed 18 October 2023 in Technical Solutions • Tagged with technical

Comparing two numerical variables in Python can have surprising results if you aren't aware of some common gotchas. This post covers a couple of the common ones.


Python Gotcha: Join vs Concat

Posted on Thu 12 October 2023 in Technical Solutions • Tagged with technical

Append 100,000 strings together using join or concat - Which is faster?


Python Gotcha: Mutable Default Optional Arguments

Posted on Fri 06 October 2023 in Technical Solutions • Tagged with technical

A quick walk through of why mutable defaults on optional arguments is bad in Python.


Syncing Obsidian Notes across devices using Git and GitLab

Posted on Tue 26 September 2023 in Technical Solutions • Tagged with technical

Setting up Obsidian to sync notes across devices utilizing git and a GitLab backend


How to disable Grafana in Gitlab 16.3 Omnibus

Posted on Wed 23 August 2023 in Technical Solutions • Tagged with technical

GitLab 16.3 deprecated and disabled the bundled Grafana, but didn't provide complete instructions for how to disable it. Fortunately, it's easy to do. I've documented the few steps needed.


Failure of Management - Unlimited PTO

Posted on Mon 14 August 2023 in Jobs • Tagged with job, meta, leadership

Unlimited PTO is a perk more and more organization are offering their employees. Unfortunately, many managers and organization are managing this poorly and failing their employees. What does this management failure look like?


Stack Exchange Strike - The strike is over

Posted on Mon 07 August 2023 in Stack Exchange Strike • Tagged with Stack Exchange, moderation

Stack Exchange moderators are done striking. What did two months of inaction on the part of curators achieve?


Stack Exchange Strike - Community and AI Talk Reaction

Posted on Thu 27 July 2023 in Stack Exchange Strike • Tagged with Stack Exchange, moderation

Stack Exchange moderators are striking. This is my reaction to Stack Exchange's products and updates announced at the WeAreDevelopers conference.