~/vaelenportfolio
Tokyo · JST

STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER · 25 YEARS IN PRODUCTION

andrew
young_

I build distributed systems and the tooling around them — from IBM's mainframe-backed support portal, to satellite ground stations in Go, to the AI agents that now keep Indeed's systems reliable.

guest@vaelen:~$ whoami

Andrew Young — Staff Software Engineer, Indeed (Tokyo)

guest@vaelen:~$ cat focus.txt

reliability · software quality · AI agents

guest@vaelen:~$ help

try: ls · open appletalk · run basic · track iss · resume

01 / live demos

C → WebAssembly · runs in your browser
Microsoft BASIC (1977) on an emulated 6502.

Press boot, then Enter at TERMINAL WIDTH?
Try:  PRINT 2+2
      10 PRINT "HELLO ";:GOTO 10
      RUN     (Ctrl-C stops it)
v6502c6502 emulator in ANSI C, running Microsoft BASIC unmodified
lat
—
lon
—
alt
—
speed
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sgp4C99 satellite propagator, computing this orbit in your browser. Orbit data: loads when visible

02 / open source

total 9 · sorted by date

03 / git log --career

full résumé →
  1. 2026–nowIndeedStaff SWE — cross-org reliability and software quality through AI agents; internal agent skills and plugin.
  2. 2020–2026IndeedEngineering Manager — taxonomy platform with <20 ms APIs at millions of requests/day; graph DB rollout; MCP servers.
  3. 2017–2020InfostellarFirst full-time engineer → Head of Ground Systems → Director of Network Ops. Supported the IOD-1 launch.
  4. 2016–2017MongoDBNorth America subject-matter expert on sharding and distributed systems.
  5. 2013–2016Kabam · BoonZero-trust loyalty APIs and SDKs; then a full engineering turnaround (Git, CI/CD, Jira, Scrumban).
  6. 1999–2012IBM → Rackspace …Portal i18n across seven countries; cloud REST APIs that fed OpenStack; ARM EDA tooling; NLP research.

04 / blog

18 posts · newest first
  1. Choosing a Local Model for an Offline Tarot ReaderProgramming · AI
  2. Extracting Names from the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland with an LLMProgramming · AI · Genealogy
  3. Building gedcom-skills: A Claude Code Plugin for GenealogyProgramming · AI · Genealogy
  4. Using Claude Code and Sub-Agents to Build a Simple Database Library (vdb)Programming · Algorithms · AI
  5. vDB: A Simple DB in C for Retro ComputingProgramming · Algorithms · Retrocomputing · Databases
  6. Why Not COBOL?Programming · COBOL
  7. ARM Assembly: SortingProgramming · ARM · Assembly · Algorithms
  8. ARM Assembly: Binary HeapsProgramming · ARM · Assembly · Data Structures
  9. A MUSH Written in Racket (Scheme)Programming · LISP
  10. Regular Expression Magic and ViMProgramming · Regular Expressions · Vi
  11. Skype Problems on Ubuntu 13.04 64bitLinux
  12. Editing Percent Values Using Dijit's NumberTextBoxProgramming · Javascript
  13. A Simple Esperanto Keyboard for iPhoneProgramming · Esperanto
  14. XML Generation in RPGProgramming · RPG · XML
  15. Huffman Coding, Unicode, and CJKV DataProgramming · Algorithms · Internationalization · Japanese
  16. First Release of Japanese Dependency VectorsProgramming · Linguistics · Natural Language Processing · Japanese
  17. Japanese Dependency VectorsProgramming · Linguistics · Natural Language Processing · Japanese
  18. Emacs, Clojure, and JapaneseProgramming · LISP · Emacs · Japanese