Andrew Griffiths

- Profile -

I'm a software development engineer currently working in Warsaw, Poland. I have a vast experience of development projects, particularly in the field of discrete event simulation. I have worked in various industry sectors including manufacturing and warehousing, but my main area of expertise lies in the domain of nuclear decommissioning.

Engineering and understanding how things work have always been of great interest to me. Having studied mathematics at university, I started my career in simulation and found that it was the perfect way to apply my theoretical knowledge to real life operations. What's more, working in this field involved a huge amount of collaboration with clients and a detailed understanding of their operations, giving me the opportunity to spend a great deal of time on-site and visit lots of interesting places.

Working in small teams that developped high end 3D simulation solutions, including development of user interfaces, databases and analytics reports, I acquired a broad range of software development competences in diverse technologies. These experiences fuelled my appetite to develop better and better solutions, and eventually led to me moving into a pure development role.

I therefore have an interesting mix of consulting, development and analytical skills; all of which are required in order to work alongside and deliver effective simulation studies to clients. It's great to have had the opportunity to work with clients from all sorts of industries and to see the differences and similarities between their processes. There is nothing better than delivering a successful project that enthuses clients, deepens their understanding of their operations and provides insight for further potential at their sites.

My broad experience makes me hugely versatile, and appreciative of the needs and expectations of clients. In addition I have worked in a number of different countries and am therefore extremely comfortable working in an international environment. Originally from the UK, I spent 7 years working there before moving to France and working there for 4 years in a French-speaking role, and then eventually settling in Warsaw, Poland.

- Abilities -

- Projects -

• Client Manager

  Client Manager

  This is an .NET visual C++ application that I developed for my brother to use at his work. He required a way of keeping track of a number of specific tasks that were due for a long list of clients prior to a final date. Due to the number of tasks due and the range of clients, he needed a method to determine which clients required most urgent attention.

  As well as fulfilling this need, Client Manager also included features such as user management and data encryption, so that his client's information was kept securely, a dynamic user interface so that clients could be managed easily, and export to CSV and Excel facilities so that data could be manipulated elsewhere if need be.

  andrewgriffiths.eu/clientmanager
• Press It

  Press It

  This was my first attempt at Android development. It is a simple game where the player has different game modes to choose from; they could either race to see how many times they could click the "Press It" button in a number of different time intervals, or race to see how quickly they could press the button 100 times.

  The project enabled me to become familar with different aspects of Android development, from the coding of the application itself and the Eclipse environment, through to the testing procedures, and finally publishing it on Google Play.

  andrewgriffiths.eu/pressit
• VM Snapshots

  VM Snapshots

  This is a small Windows application which can be used to automatically take periodic snapshots of an Oracle VM VirtualBox virtual machine. Taking snapshots of virtual machines can be particularly useful during analysis and testing of large, complex computer simulation models, which typically take a number of hours to run and cannot be rewound; the existence of a snaphot on a virtual machine allows historic points of a simulation to be revisited after the run has completed in order to understand in detail the interactions that have occurred.

  VM Snapshots was particularly interesting for me, not only because it is extremely useful in my everyday job, but also because it gave me the opportunity to broaden my technical abilities. I decided that for this project I would use a web style graphical user interface (GUI), leading to me learning about Sciter, and I also decided that the project would be completed nicely with a custom built installer, leading to me learning about the WiX Toolset.

  andrewgriffiths.eu/vmsnapshots
• PDF

  Les Rapports entre les Mathématiques et la Musique

  During my French studies at university, I was required to publish a paper related to my field of study in French. I took the opportunity to take two subjects of great intrest to me and write about them together, resulting in an examination of the links between mathematics and music.

  The paper touches on areas such as the ratios of soundwave frequencies and musical scales, Euler's degrees of sweetness, musical timing, and even more abstract links such as occurences of the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio in musical compositions.

  RapportsEntreMathematiquesEtMusique.pdf
• PDF

  Tackling Collusion in Web Graphs and P2P Networks

  The only piece of written work that I was expected to produce for my mathematics degree was a piece of research looking at and comparing existing papers. I chose to look at papers dealing with how various ranking and reputation systems for web pages on the internet and peers in peer to peer networks are susceptible to collusion.

  In particular, I examined Improving Eigen-Vector Based Reputation Systems Against Collusion (Zang, Goel, Govindan, Mason & Van Roy), The EigenTrust Algorithm for Reputation Management in P2P Networks (Kamvar, Schlosser & Garcia-Molina), and PageRank Increase under Different Collusion Topologies (Baeza-Yates, Castillo & López).

  MATH36201-PROJECT.pdf