About

Hello! My name is Brian Gardner. I'm a software developer with a passion for teaching others how to build cool things. I live in Savannah, Georgia with my wonderful wife, Carley, and our two daughters.

Education

I enrolled at Georgia Tech in 2008 as an Aerospace Engineering student. In my second year I took a Matlab course that ended up changing everything — I found that I loved programming which led me into more CS electives. After further study I changed my major to Computer Science where I earned a B.S. with honors in 2012.

Work

I spent four and a half years at Cash App, where I worked on various teams including the release automation and tooling team, the commerce team, and the banking team. On the release automation team my focus included building and maintaining testing infrastructure that scales across Android, iOS, and Web. My favorite project is Trailblaze, an AI-driven end-to-end testing library that standardizes testing practices across platforms and accelerates QA productivity across the team. I also led initiatives around AI-driven developer workflows and spent significant time mentoring engineers at all levels.

Before Cash App, I spent nearly a decade at Big Nerd Ranch as an Android developer, instructor, and team manager. I co-authored the fourth edition of Android Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide. Teaching and writing about Android development is what led me to start this blog.