Andrew "Red" Witschonke
Director of Engineering, Claris
As Director of Engineering for Claris Platform development at Beezwax, Andrew oversees project teams working for clients, while architecting custom solutions for their unique business and organizational needs. He's program leader for several organizational development programs at Beezwax, leading training and creating curriculum for apprentices and junior developers, as well as building tools, libraries and modules for use by the greater FileMaker development team.
His tendency towards all things technology is what brought Andrew to Beezwax. His combination of skills, including appreciating the subtleties of good design when creating user interfaces, along with the technical expertise and logic of coding and defining relations, made FileMaker development and Beezwax an ideal home.
Andrew graduated in the top of his class from Cal Poly Pomona with a degree in Landscape Architecture, then started his career working as an industrial product designer. It was in this role that he was first introduced to FileMaker. The company used FileMaker at all levels of their business, but had no dedicated in-house developer or consultant. Seeing the potential for improving his own workflow, Andrew quickly got to work on creating new scripts and layouts to help him expedite his work. Soon after, managers noticed his work and he was given full charge of the company's FileMaker deployment. As he continued to grow his development skills, he realized that he began to prefer development to product design.
While not glued to a computer, you may find Andrew with his wife marathoning an old sci-fi show on Netflix or at a local coffee shop playing a casual game of Magic the Gathering. Although a homebody at heart, Andrew also enjoys traveling, both domestically and abroad, as an opportunity to experience other people, their customs, and ways of thinking. Among friends, he and his wife are known for hosting "game nights", playing rounds of unique board games of all sorts with a healthy portion of delicious home-cooked food and good wine.
