Andrew Martens' blog

About me

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:05:21 -0700

By day I’m a software development manager at Zillow, where I’ve spent the last decade or so first building data systems and APIs and now lead teams that build products for real estate agents.

Before Zillow, I spent more than a decade working in a wide range of industries. I worked on a Debian-based Linux distribution before Ubuntu existed, and on call processing for 2G/3G mobile soft switches. I was the sole software developer at a geophysics firm, building bespoke survey tools that tied into sonar, GPS and seismic equipment. I also worked on web performance optimization at Strangeloop, monitoring building energy data at Pulse Energy, and distracted-driving prevention at Aegis Mobility. At NodeFly and StrongLoop I built real-time monitoring for Node.js, and at CommandWear I led development of mobile and wearable tools for first responders. Along the way I’ve used everything from C and C++ to Java, Ruby on Rails, Scala and Javascript.

Another decade, another blog

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:55:43 -0700

When you retire your old Wordpress blog, replace it with a beta of Ghost in 2013, and then ignore it for the next 13 years, you may realize that you should have used a static site generator to begin with.

Let’s try using Hugo this time.

Time For A Change

Tue, 26 Nov 2013 12:00:00 -0700

I’ve been meaning to update my blog for quite a while now, though it was always rather far down my to-do list. For years I had used WordPress - it worked well enough, had a plethora of customization options, and obviously had a lot of market support, being used by over 50% of the world’s top 100 blogs. Yet for me, WordPress had lost its lustre.