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Away from a keyboard

Snowboarding, guitars, and taking hardware apart.

The work side is on the home page

Andrew carving a turn through soft snow, spray coming off the board.
Lake Louise, Alberta

Snowboarding

I snowboard as much as the season allows, mostly on ungroomed terrain, and a good chunk of my winter is planned around getting to the mountain.

Andrew standing with his snowboard at the top of a run, snow-covered peaks behind him.
Lake Louise, Alberta

Guitars and amps

Twelve instruments at last count. The amp rig took longer: it came together over several years of buying things secondhand and fixing what was wrong with them.

The bass amp arrived with corroded output jacks, so I opened it up and replaced them.

Five electric guitars and a bass on stands and hung on the wall of Andrew's room.
Some of the collection.
A Boss amp head on a Behringer 4x12 cabinet, with an Ampeg, a Fender combo and a practice amp alongside.
The rig, assembled secondhand over several years.

The current favourite is a Yamaha Revstar Standard, modded with a killswitch and a kill button. I've been getting into 3D modelling, so as a fun exercise I decided to model it. Here's where that has got to so far, with the modded parts marked.

A blue Yamaha Revstar Standard with a white racing stripe, laid on a hardwood floor, with a killswitch toggle and a kill button added alongside the stock controls.

Yamaha Revstar Standard, with a killswitch and kill button added. Drag the knobs and switches to explore. Visual controls only.

Download the model (GLB)CC0 1.0 — public domain, use it however you like

Some of it ends up recorded. This is one of the instrumentals; like most of them, it's unfinished.

Untitled instrumental

Produced by Andrew Polyakov

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Download

This is on the experimental side of what I make.

Albums I keep going back to

Titles open in Spotify

A PlayStation 3 motherboard on an iFixit project mat, with fresh thermal paste on the Cell and RSX chips.
A PS3 mid-repaste. It runs the TV in my living room now.

Building and fixing things

I build and work on computers, and I mod iPods and other entertainment hardware for fun. My main music player is a 1 TB iPod running Rockbox, because my FLAC collection stopped fitting on anything you can buy in a store. The board above is a PS3 I stripped down to repaste and mod; it is the media player under my TV now.

None of this is professional experience, but it's the same kind of troubleshooting: it worked yesterday, it doesn't today, and you find out why by checking one thing at a time.

Get in touch

Open to internships and new-grad roles for 2027.

Email meGitHub