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Andy Chu

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Experience

2016 - present Creator, Language Engineer - Oils for Unix
An independent, non-profit project to restore and re-imagine the Unix shell. Funded by NLnet from 2022 to 2026.

2005 - 2016 Software Engineer at Google Mountain View and San Francisco, CA
2014 - 2016


Security Research.
RAPPOR: data collection with differential privacy guarantees.

2012 - 2014


Storage Analytics.
Instrumentation and analysis of Google's cluster storage. (related publication)

2012


Search traffic forecasting.
Small R infrastructure project.

2009 - 2011


Index Quality.
Tools and policy for Google index selection. (related article)

2008 - 2009


Google Code (formerly http://code.google.com/hosting)
Back-end systems; user-facing features.

2005 - 2007


Engineering Tools.
Built tools used by the entire company for 10+ years. Worked with Guido van Rossum.

various






Python teacher (2009 - 2013)
R infrastructure (2010 - )
Near duplicates research
Many 20% projects
~200 interviews


2002 - 2004 Software Engineer at Electronic Arts Redwood City, CA
Shipped Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003, 2004, and 2005 for PS2, GameCube, and XBox.
Audio Tools and Engine.
Source control, build, and content pipeline.


Summer 2000 Intern at Xerox PARC Palo Alto, CA
Modular robotics research.

Education

1997 - 2001 Cornell University Ithaca, NY
M. Eng. in Computer Science. Lester Knight Scholarship. Project on gossip protocols with Werner Vogels.
B.S. in Computer Science. Magna cum laude.

Open Source

See my Projects page.

Patents and Publications

Deep Learning with Differential Privacy at ACM CCS 2016. This paper won a Frontiers of Science Award at the International Congress of Basic Science (Beijing, China, July 2024).

US8290962 B1 Determining the relationship between source code bases

Tools

  • Python, C++, C, shell
  • JavaScript, R
  • Java, OCaml
  • SQL, HTML
  • Linux
  • Most of Google's big data tools

Interests

  • Distributed software architecture
  • Unix and Internet protocols
  • System administration
  • Concurrency
  • Data analysis, big and small
  • Visualization
  • Performance and utilization
  • Software security and privacy
  • Language design and implementation
  • Open source software
  • Reproducible builds and version control
  • Reproducible research
  • Other: guitar, drumset, percussion, biking

My LinkedIn profile

Updated April 2026.