EXPERIENCE

☁️ NetApp

Software Engineering Intern
ONTAP (storage OS) Team: Shipped the OKM Toolkit, a cluster-passphrase recovery utility for encrypted ONTAP systems, now used by customer support. Implemented cluster-wide password handling, AES-based encryption, OpenSSL primitives, and TPM/key-file recovery. Lots of C++ and free snacks!

🌲 Appalachian State University

Teaching Assistant
CS 3481 - Computer Systems: Gave talks on GDB, Valgrind, C & C++ Programming, Architecture, and Assembly. Held regular office hours, led Lab sections, and reviewed/graded student programming assignments. Spawned a love for low-level systems programming.

Research Assistant
Maths Department: Translating recent papers into Python models then testing and visualizing the results. A short-lived experience but a lot of fun, and my introduction to academia.

Private Tutor
Operated an independent tutoring venture for collegiate-level Calculus, Statistics, Linear Algebra, and Discrete Mathematics. Classic College-kid hustle.

SELECTED PROJECTS

Interactive GPU Fluid Sandbox
(C++, CUDA, 2025) Paper
Rreal-time GPU fluid simulation running 1M+ cells (1024²) at 60 FPS. Implemented CUDA kernels for advection, diffusion, and Poisson pressure projection; optimized shared memory tiling & coalesced access for ~32× speedup over my OpenMP CPU baseline.

Lock-Free MPMC Telemetry Buffer
(C++, 2025) Repo
High-throughput thread-safe queue for log/metric collection from many threads with low latency. Designed as a bounded ring using C++20 atomics & cache-line padding to eliminate contention and false sharing. Sustains ~6.1M events/s on 8 cores, outperforming std::mutex by ~900% (p99 enqueue < 8 μs)!

IN PROGRESS

C to LLVM Compiler
(C++)
Writing a C-subset compiler with custom loop-invariant code motion and strength reduction.

Micro-Firewall DSL
(C, C++)
Inventing a small Domain-Specific Language (DSL) compiling to eBPF bytecode for programmable packet filtering. Currently learning the network stack!

CAPABILITIES

Languages:
C++, C, Python, Rust, Bash, SQL, Assembly. Adaptable to new languages quickly! Concurrency & GPU:
CUDA, OpenMP, MPI, SIMD vectorization, lock-free algorithms. Tooling:
Linux (eBPF, perf), CMake, GDB, Valgrind, GodBolt, Git, Docker, CI/CD Pipelines. Domain:
I'm extremely interested in working with high-performance systems, concurrency, networking, runtimes, operating systems, and related tooling!

EMAIL
blackwellaf@appstate.edu
LINKEDIN
linkedin.com/in/blackwellaf
GITHUB
github.com/andrewblackwell
MY BLOG
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