Andrew Werner

He/Him
andrew@andrewwerner.com
+1 (615) 768-9920
🇺🇸 The United States of America & The Republic of Croatia 🇭🇷

I am thankful that I am fortunate to have (and have had) intelligent and loving friends, family, and a home. Growing up in the Town of Fairfield, Connecticut with a well-connected community has been tremendously helpful. Living between Bridgeport and Westport has opened my eyes to the consequences of wealth inequality. I attended public schools and went to Warde High School with my Mom who teaches a variety of science classes there. I am thankful for the passionate teachers that have educated me. I am thankful for Bridgeport Hospital and the healthcare workers that have saved my life. I am also thankful for the Diocese of Bridgeport. I strive to be charitable. I confess I operate on limited wisdom and perspective, and think the scientific method is incapable of proving some of the theories I've read. I simply have faith in my beliefs. I'm still a proponent of using it for research and medicine knowing the achievements of scientists that fish for Heaven.

Activities

I am an advocate for the democratic republic model of state governance, free market capitalism (Feeding America's market for food banks proves Ronald Coase's rebuke of Vladimir Lenin's one single factory in The Nature of the Firm), accessible education, and collective narrative infrastructure. I'm saving up for a Chatham House membership for their eLibrary and a Philanthropy.com membership for GrantStation. For risk management, OpenRiskManual.org is useful to reference. For music management I suggest Sentric -> Distrokid -> Terrorbird -> AWAL. For geospatial data processing, I love Cloud-Optimized Geospatial Formats and I have found Development Seed's zine to be very educational. For privacy, I recommend Proton Pass & SimpleLogin (I created a free Proton account then purchased a lifetime subscription), Cloaked.com is great, I hate credit cards so I use Privacy.com to protect my debit card numbers, and iPostal1 to shield my address from merchants.

Inspired by Renaissance Technologies, I plan to sit for the Series 65 Investment Adviser exam, and I have been studying to write quantitative financial algorithms. Inspired by the University of Cambridge Centre for Business Research paper Shareholder Value or Public Purpose? From John Maynard Keynes and Adolf Berle to the Modern Debate by Suzanne Konzelmann, Victoria Chick, and Marc Fovargue-Davies, I am planning on incorporating and investing in public benefit entities (PBLP/PBLLC/PBCs) with measurable purpose statements. I have had good experiences with Harvard Business Services, Inc., and I read they can assist with the formation of the public benefit entities, however currently their website does not have the option to create public benefit entities online. I may call +1(800)345-2677 ext 6900 or email info@delawareinc.com. After reading The “Value” of a Public Benefit Corporation by Jill E. Fisch & Steven Davidoff Solomon, I condemn vague and abstract purpose statements that do little but argue against the fiduciary duty of executives to shareholders. Thank you Ken Adams for criticizing abstract nouns. His book A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting is excellent. I like the flexibility to redline and negotiate agreements with private credit and boutique banks. I condemn private equity firms that loan-to-own their way to cutting pension. Vulture funds give the industry an evil reputation, but not every merger or acquisition is a hostile takeover. I condemn the abuse of patent offices with unnecessarily complicated patent thickets. To navigate these thickets, I found the law review articles Into the Woods and In the Thick(et) of It informative. I agree with using Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards for measuring management. Black box artificial intelligence models often produce errors. I encourage using tractable probabilistic models in all industries.

I personally like the looks of Interactive Brokers for international securities, Charles Schwab for payment-for-order-flow routing, Lightspeed brokerage for co-location near exchanges (quantum clocks and the Open Compute Project’s Time Appliance [I call it the chronomeister] are of interest), Wedbush Securities for clearing, and Bank of New York for custody. Investors’ Exchange (IEX) and their speed bump is also interesting because Ultra Ethernet network interface cards, EDSFF data storage, and custom application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are expensive. OpenSanctions & fuzzy name matching, Plaid (KYC for investors), and Middesk (KYB for investments) are essential. On the matter of securities offerings, I am curious about Reg D (Nasdaq Private Market and Forge Global bring liquidity to private markets, but a lot of the companies I am interested in aren't on those alternative trading systems [ATS]. Venture capital has access to more deals as unknown founders pitch to them [the tech industry venture capitalists use the term "pitch deck" and I think the mainstream financial industry uses "pitch book"]) to Reg A to SPAC/Form S-1 initial public offering (IPO). I have to contemplate Reg CF more. Midsize Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB)-registered financial auditors like Citrin Cooperman, EisnerAmper, CohnReznick seem to align with my frugality. The Big Four aren’t for everybody.

Design, Productivity & Business Administration

Patriot Payroll, Thatch for Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA) benefits management, Horilla for human resources management (HRM) for it's support of Andrew Grove's objectives and key results (OKRs) which John Doerr expands upon here, Remofirst for international HR employer of record (EOR) services, Weblate for internationalization/language translation done by professionals, Taiga.io for project management, Penpot.io for designing application prototypes, Twenty for customer relationship management (CRM), Swetrix for web analytics, Tracardi for customer segmentation, Activepieces for marketing automation (Node-RED is truly FOSS, but Activepieces is more convenient), ListMonk for newsletters, transactional emails and Fonoster-based SMS, Documenso for e-signatures, Papermark for document sharing/data/deal rooms, Docmost for team wikis with realtime collaboration, NextCloud for team drive/office suite, and Odoo for enterprise resource planning (ERP) back-office tasks like accounting and expense management that the other tools are not capable of.

For archiving, traditional banker’s boxes are not suitable to withstand our anthropogenic activities. I prefer 100% cotton paper printed by the Canon GX4020 with pigment ink (refilling ink tank printers is more affordable than replacing ink cartridges), stored in acid and lignin-free boxes and folders. For sustainable copy paper I prefer sugarcane fiber. ULINE, Southworth, and BAZIC Products are great. I trust Iron Mountain for offsite archiving.

Private Cloud Work

Information Technology Proficiencies & Passions

Microsoft Azure, Ubuntu and Debian, Arch Linux, Flatcar Container Linux, I rely on TPM2.0, but I’m interested in OpenTitan and RISC-V Silicon Root of Trust chips, I’m excited about the CHERI Alliance for confidential computing secure enclaves, SQL and Postgres, Kubernetes (I prefer k0s over kubeadm, Metal3 over Tinkerbell (Cluster API), CRI-O over containerd, crun over runc, Podman over Docker, Canonical Rockcraft or Red Hat UBI over Wolfi over Alpine. I like Kata Containers and CoCo confidential containers, Cilium/Hubble/Tetragon, Trivy, Notary, and Harbor), OpenStack Barbican, KeyCloak, EJBCA (certificate authority), KubeVirt, Zero Trust Networking & Wireguard (I prefer NetBird for NAT traversal on residential networks lacking port forwarding capability), Nix, Argo, Just & Bazel (BuildFarm enables distributed builds that Buck, cmake, and ninja lack).

Programming

Python, JavaScript/TypeScript. I’m working in Golang on a private cloud provisioning tool with pivot automation capability. I’ve started using Google Gemini as a code assistant, but it’s too messy and so I am adopting StrictDoc for requirements management.

Sometimes I think too hard and believe I need to design application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and write memory safe applications in Ada. Ada’s a little slow but it’s safe. Rust isn’t as safe, but it’s faster. Bjarne Stroustrup’s introduction of concepts to C++ is cool, but C++ is like bowling with the gutters down. 3D integrated circuits are the future, AI is needed to design them. Proprietary software is too expensive for me. The closest open source equivalents are not as good, but China is closing the gap in both design and fabrication tooling. ASML lithography machines are still the best, and there’s only a couple fabs in the world that can afford them. The licenses for proprietary instruction set architectures (ISA) are also too expensive for me. I love RISC-V’s free and open source nature. It’s backed by the Linux Foundation. It recently got mainline GPU support, but it’s not as featureful as x86-64/ARM. I wish for Sylkan to cut out the Rusticl-on-Zink translation and go straight to Vulkan. NVIDIA’s CUDA programming language is more featureful than AMD’s ROCm and Intel’s OneAPI. I personally prefer AdaptiveCpp for its heterogenous hardware support. I switch hardware around and I don’t like to rewrite code. I like what I see out of the Berkeley Architecture Research lab - specifically Chisel (based on Scala). VHDL is a little outdated. Chisel compiles down to Verilog.

Experience

TooCuteTreats.com — A dog treat company.

Co-Founder & Former Assistant Manager | 2025 - Present

Currently resigned due to confusion about the mandatory conscription of Croatian citizens into military service in response to Vladimir Putin's atrocious mobilization of the Russian military for war on Ukraine and incursions into Europe. For religious, moral, and medical reasons I conscientiously object to military service. Counting 2 Maccabees as part of the Deuterocanonical books, I pray for the dead and to Basil of Caesarea for peaceful diplomacy between Croatia and Serbia.

I am open to civil service and the European private sector. I plan on incorporating a multi-national consulting firm so that I can continue to advise my Co-Founder grow the company while I am overseas. Practicing the intercession of saints I invoked Francis of Assisi for his patronage of animals, and I have thoroughly enjoyed making dog treats.

Education

Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU)

B.S. in Environmental Science (Data Analytics) | 2023 | GPA: 4.0

SNHU is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education which is the same accreditation body that accredits Harvard University and The Massachussets Institute of Technology (MIT).

I transferred from The Universty of Connecticut's Special Program in Pre-Pharmacy where grief from the passing of a close friend and the COVID-19 pandemic made my studies difficult.

I learn best through peer-to-peer hermeneutical dialogue, an internet connection, and staying skeptical and critically examining Google Gemini's responses to my questions (Socratic method) and prompts/queries. Using ontology (what is real?) and epistemology (what does it mean to know?), I self-study and, through post-structuralist perspectives, I piece together information as fragments of the truth. I am curious about both the humanities and the sciences. In science (e.g. geology and crystals), we try to interpret the world. In humanities, we are interpreters that try to interpret other interpreters. I study math best by learning about the history of the people behind it and what they were working on (I recommend A History of Mathematics by Carl B. Boyer & Uta C. Merzbach). I believe in creationism, that we are anthropic observers living in a fine-tuned universe, the symmetry and subsequent asymmetry of baryogengesis, emergent gravity, abiogenesis (from dust to dust [Genesis 3:19]), the hologenome theory of evolution, and the law of increasing complexity. I love reading research from the Santa Fe Institute and I wish to see the bison on the prairie at Fermilab someday. Jennet Conant’s book Tuxedo Park and Ananyo Bhattacharya’s The Man from the Future are great. John von Neumann was a mad genius. I condemn his pursuit to weaponize the weather. Weather modification (e.g. cloud seeding) can be used virtuously. I worry about the technology being used sinfully. Environmental conservation is important. I wish for our reservoirs to be surveilled by seL4 & RISC-V equipment and for the modernization of the geospatial monitoring of our environment. I am worried about our biological exposomes (the effects of what we're exposed to) and the pollution from our anthropogenic activities. I am a proponent of universal human dignity. I see the colors of our skin as melanin and I pray for more equitable economics and social policy for all. I enjoy creative writing and public speaking. I think René Girard's theory of mimetic violence is true and I examine genocides and war through the perspective of recursive trauma. I strongly believe that virtue can spread recursively as well. I only like to talk about geneology when it's for heritage studies and personalized medicine. Hartmut Behr's proposition of "peace in difference" resonates with me. His book Politics of Difference: Epistemologies of Peace is difficult to read. I need a search engine and AI nearby to understand it. Dispelling the Thule Society, I know Vril: The Coming Race to be a work of fiction that was misunderstood and weaponized. The history of Zionism is complicated and controversial. The Bund were mostly unsuccessful, and Bolshevism meant atheism. I condemn genocide. I was surprised to find Mary and Joseph in the Quran. Shalom. Love thy Neighbor. Salam. I apologize if you are confused by the pluralism of the United States' first amendment to the constitution. Deseret News (a Mormon publication) has a good article on it and Jonathan Greenblatt's words in Pluralism And Polarization – The Quest For A More Perfect Union align with the practice of Ubuntu (I am because we are). Peace be with you. Access to holy sites is important for everybody. The protection of the Temple Mount, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Stations of the Cross, and Calvary (the site of his crucifixion) is important to me. I am curious about the historical prevalance of Buddhist ideas around the region of the Holy Land. Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West: Between Mind and Body by Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston looks interesting.

Learning & Exploration

CISO Assistant, Prowler, VerifyWise, React Native (I personally prefer Qwik for its Google LightHouse scores), PyTorch/AI, OpenAI Triton (I wish SYCL was more popular), Ray.io, MLflow, FerretDB, Valkey, NebulaGraph, Milvus, Prometheus/Thanos, Grafana, Apache Cassandra, Kafka, Flink, Spark, Airflow, Superset, Hudi, Presto, Velero, Kubewarden, OpenTelemetry, Genode & seL4.

I am concerned with the cybersecurity infrastructure I see and advocate for trust and accountability. Hyperledger Fabric and Chaincode seem to be useful for securing supply chains with immutable chains of custody.

Certifications & Honors

  • Microsoft Certified Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) - 2024
  • National Society of Leadership and Success (Alpha Sigma Pi) - Member, 2023
  • Scouting America - Eagle Scout, 2017

I edited the intelligence cycle graphic from Wikipedia and generated this butterfly effect graphic with Google Gemini. We share the same environment and intelligentsia. We do some work and talk about it, sometimes publish it. It stays disparate until someone or some algorithms string it together. I follow my curiosity trying to make sense of it all as I live my life and surf the web. I try to avoid secrets. The weaponization of academic research is concerning. Cure cancer? Duh, go for it! Precision oncology research and cancer vaccines could help us all. At the same time, I have concerns. I condemn complete freedom and anarchy. For some things, there should only be a front door. The French School of Economic Warfare and Pierre Poivre are interesting to me. Innovation is creatively destructive. Small businesses can disrupt monopolies with intelligence.

Intelligence cycle Butterfly effect

A Prayer for Our Environment from Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’

All-powerful God, you are present in the whole universe and in the smallest of your creatures.
You embrace with your tenderness all that exists.
Pour out upon us the power of your love,
that we may protect life and beauty.
Fill us with peace, that we may live
as brothers and sisters, harming no one.
O God of the poor,
help us to rescue the abandoned and forgotten of this earth, so precious in your eyes.
Bring healing to our lives,
that we may protect the world and not prey on it,
that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction.
Touch the hearts of those who look only for gain
at the expense of the poor and the earth.
Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,
to be filled with awe and contemplation,
to recognize that we are profoundly united
with every creature as we journey towards your infinite light.
We thank you for being with us each day.
Encourage us, we pray, in our struggle
for justice, love and peace.

We are all connected in this environment. Butterfly effects emerge from our anthropogenic activities.

In the complexity of our relations is where my faith, hope, love, and charity emerges.

The history of the Aramaic word "Ephphatha" from Jesus (Mark 7:34), His parable of the Grain of Wheat, The Bible moralisée, and The Book of Divine Works are powerful.

I like liberation theology and believe in the Immaculate Heart and Immaculate Conception of Our Lady of Guadalupe (Mary, mother of Jesus). I am interested in Justin Martyr’s Logos Spermatikos. I believe that only God knows everything (omniscience). Disagreeing with Pelagius, I believe in the original sin and the Fall. Inspired by Pope John Paul II’s call to breathe both the Western and Eastern churches as one set of lungs, I am reading Anna M. Silvas’s translation of The Rule of St. Basil in Latin and English. I affirm the Holy Trinity, the Act of Contrition, Apostles’ Creed, and the Nicene Creed believing that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both The Father, and from the Son.

The closest Jesus came to violence was furnishing a whip that He did not use on a person (John 2:15)

I get wary of mass surveillance, but I think of the heuristic that God is always recording. Only He has total information awareness. To paint a picture, 🎭👨‍🎨🖼️, in this world, His perfectly symmetrical divine light, the Logos, refracts through a prism (I think the prism is the Fall) like Isaac Newton's Opticks that creates a rainbow of asymmetrical quantum information that is our world. I sense a parallel in the symmetry and subsequent asymmetry of baryogengesis. The phrase creation "unfolding" and the unfurling of a flower's petals comes to mind, with our love emerging in the complexity of it all. I may know one subject matter, red, and you may know another, blue, green, any hermeneutic, any belief, any color. We navigate the rainbow of information with limited perspective/aspect (e.g. mind-body dual aspect or mind-body-soul triple aspect). Jesus came with infinity aspect and gave us the gospel and we are trying to interpret His teachings as He intended.

Examining the etymology of the words Roman Catholic, I am part of the laity of the Roman rite of the Universal Church — The word “catholic” is Latin for “universal”, and we all share one Christ who really did exist and work miracles. With personal piety, in the pluralism of the United States' first amendment to the constitution, I affirm Eun-Sil Son’s work Sola fide or fide caritate formata: Two incompatible principles? From Martin Luther to Thomas Aquinas as a metaphysical bridge between my Lutheran friends' sola fide (justification through “faith alone”) and the Roman Catholic “fide caritate formata” (justification through faith formed by love), as through faith alone (the faith of those who nurture us), we receive the sacrament of baptism (I was baptized in the suburbs of Houston, Texas) and through our grafted branches onto Jesus’ vine (Romans 11:17), love flows from His Sacred Heart and shapes us to be virtuous.

Contemplating modern social arguments with liberation theology, specifically social ontology and phenomenology of gender and sexuality (how fluid is the question of "who am I?" and how do we answer it? — how are our identities shaped?), I wonder if, one day, the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church (with the laity, the clergy, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Synod of Bishops, and the pope all walking together) could be opened to the ordination of women (like the Anglicans), gender affirming care, and demisexual matrimony? I don't have control of these matters, that is above me. For now, ELCA RIC is where I have seen the LGBTQ Christian community affirmed in the pluralism of the United States' first amendment to the constitution. I’m an advocate for "peace in difference" and love thy neighbor regardless of whom they are, leaving no one excluded, inspired by Jesus’ Parable of the Lost Sheep.

Carlo Acutis’ website miracolieucaristici.org made me believe in miracles, and his naming of the Eucharist the “Highway to Heaven” makes me smile. I think about Michael Slote’s From Enlightenment to Receptivity when I receive communion. I know the anointing of the sick to be respected and the history of Anthony of Kiev to be real, and I am amazed that Joseph of Cupertino really flew.

Possibility

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