My name is Drew. I’m a software engineer. Below are links to some of my projects.
My RPG inspired by LOTR, WoW, and Tibia.
Tools for exploring JSON data. Includes features to generic operations like group by, filtering, sorting, media preview, plot histograms, quick statistics for attributes, and adding computed fields.
https://drewweth.com/JSON-Tool/
Explore Spatial Data with a QGIS web interface.
https://drewweth.com/geodebugger/
For tutorials and project updates
https://www.youtube.com/@Zizimaza
December 17, 2025
My name is Drew. The following is the history of how I became a software engineer. For a long time I wanted to go into medicine, but from an early age I had an obsession gaming and technology. I would play an old German MMO called Tibia, and the desire to change the game I loved so much led me discovering modding and hosting my own versions of the game.
In high school learning Lua scripting to mod games. That led me to take an Intro to Java class in high school with my best friend. We would finish assignments early, plug in our USB sticks, and play Halo over LAN.
In college, courses were taught in C, and I took some assembly courses learning the 68HC11 microcontroller. During the evenings, I would spend my time in the library making websites with Ruby on Rails’ scaffolding framework and visiting the coffee shop. On occasional weekends, my friends and I would drive a few hours to other universities in the region to participate in Hackathons and computing competitions where we would stay up until the early morning hours prototyping and learning new technologies.
One year during college, I was obsessed with League of Legends and decided to host a tournament. I rented a sizable room in Memorial Union, made a website to organize teams, designed a flyer, and posted them all over campus. More than 100 people showed up with full size PCs and at the peak of the event, we blew out power in Memorial Union. At one point, we had to run long extension cords to different rooms throughout the building to spread the power draw out over different circuits. At the time, the team and I were frantically trying to keep the event afloat, but now I just think about it and laugh. We were woefully unprepared for the turn out, but the event made it to the news. The next year we rented a much larger room and made sure to ask the building coordinator for the electrical schematics.
During the summer, I had various internships making admin dashboards with .NET, writing batch processing jobs for Java Spring applications, and expanding my knowledge of RESTful APIs. My junior year, I led the computing club and raised money for our own hackathon.
After college, my first real job was doing Scala, learning functional programming and Bayesian statistics concepts to apply to agriculture simulations for corn and soybean production in the US and Brazil. After that I started a company with my friend where I made a prototype with NextJS to allow crypto trading on Discord. We cultivated a large Discord community and raised $1m in a seed round and were accepted to Y Combinator in 2022. It was a great experience. I met a lot of great people that were on simultaneously remarkably similar and starkly different journeries from myself. After Sam Bankman Fried essentially “Enron’d” the crypto space, our company pivoted to making AI products. A few months later, I left my company to pursue my dream of making the video game I’ve always wanted to play. My most recent endeavor has been one of my most challenging yet, partially technically, but mainly and profoundly artistically.
With the advent of large language models and artifical intelligence, I feel like I’m at a crossroads between feeling userped by AI’s ability to code, and empowered with the ability to write software many times faster with these new tools. If you’re familiar with Dune by Frank Herbert, it takes place in a world post-AI where humans created artificial thinking, it grew too powerful eventually enslaved humanity, and after a war was fought between man and machines, humans have rejected artificial thinking to value human thought. There is a bittersweet feeling that software, stories, images, and videos are pieces of art that are innately human endeavors that are now replicated by algorithms. At this point I’m rambling. All this to say, I wrote this on a cold and cozy December Wednesday morning myself; mistakes and all.