Andrew McRae
Andrew McRae
I have a wife, two adult children, and live in a leafy harbourside suburb in Sydney.
In my copious spare time, I sail, go bushwalking (hiking), enjoy skiing and snowboarding, and take photographs.
I am currently enjoying a year off, having previously worked for over 16 years at Google's Sydney Engineering office.
One of my main hobbies is photography. I use a Canon 6D II digital SLR, the latest in a long line of Canon DSLRs (a 450D, a 20D, and a 300D) and other digital cameras (Canon S110, Kodak DC-290, various others) I have owned, even going back to a venerable Sony Mavica (the one with the floppy disk drive, 0.25 megapixels). You can see the results of my amateur photographic efforts in my photo gallery. My main interest is in panoramic landscape photography. One of my photos was selected for Earth Science Picture of the Day. Please note all photos on this site are © Copyright by Andrew McRae.
In September 2006 I took a trip to Mt Hagen, Papua New Guinea, to do some volunteer work (Linux training). I wrote a blog of the trip, along with some photos.
From September 2006 till February 2023 I was working at Google Inc. as part of their Sydney Engineering team, where I worked in a number of different teams, such as Google Maps, Networking, Data Centre Platforms, SRE, Chrome Operations, and ChromeOS Platforms.
Previously, for 3 years I was a Senior Principal Engineer in a Silicon Valley startup called NetDevices Inc., working on a new branch office router.
Prior to October 2003, I was at Cisco Systems, where I had been a Distinguished Engineer in the Routing Technology Group, working on next generation router architectures.
I joined cisco in October 1995 as part of the ELC group in Core Engineering. I have worked on a number of port adaptors, mostly serial and channelised. I spent 18 months on the AS5800 product, as a technical leader. I was the lead engineer on the NSE-1 , the next generation processing engine for the C7200 series. I also was the inventor and implementor of TurboACL, a new patented high speed packet classification algorithm.
Before cisco, I was a Principal Engineer at Mits Ltd. (Australia), where for 11 years I worked on real time supervisory and control systems. My responsibilities included communications and embedded systems, and a range of other areas such as Unix applications and drivers. In the dim past I co-founded a company specialising in motion control special effects and computer graphics for film and television.
In extra-curricular activities, I was an early developer of PC-Card technology for the FreeBSD project (though I doubt any of my code has actually survived), and actively promote the use and development of Open Source Software.
I was involved in the Australia Unix Users Group (AUUG), where I regularly deliver papers, hang out with the local Unix folks and generally have a good time. I was programme chair of AUUG'98.
I am a founding member and a past director of the Australian Chapter of the Internet Society.
Here is a list of papers that I have published, some of which are online, and others which can be obtained from the author.