Andy Piper is a technologist, educator, writer, and public speaker. He holds a Master of Arts in Modern History from Brasenose College, Oxford, and he is self-taught in coding and technology.

Andy’s love of computers began in the 1980s. His first hardware project was hacking a pair of Walkman headphones into an 8-bit Acorn Electron! The emergence of affordable hardware with an educational focus (e.g. Arduino and Raspberry Pi) during the past 10-15 years has enabled Andy to continue to work at the intersection of hardware and software: building fun projects, and showing and teaching them to others.

Building his own systems and solving problems naturally led Andy to the Open Source Software movement, which is an ongoing passion. The combination of this code with Open Source Hardware platforms, has enabled opportunities such as consumer-level 3D printing. Andy is developing skills in this area as part of the Forge & Craft collaboration.

Professionally, Andy spent 10 years working as a technical consultant for IBM in the UK, and went on to build a worldwide reputation as a public speaker and developer advocate over another decade at companies including VMware and Twitter. 

He is ⅓ of a weekly podcast, “Games at Work dot Biz” (available in all good podcast apps); helps with the “Makeroni” hackspace meetup at Wimbletech in Wimbledon; and loves to tinker with LEDs, and retro technology.

Andy was named in the Open UK New Year’s Honours 2023 as  amongst the top social influencers of open technology in the UK. He continues to work in online communities, and provides guidance and mentoring to help others to understand complex technical concepts.