Andy was a doer - he'd always say 'this is doable', 'let's do this', 'this is how I think this should be done'.

His knowledge of agency wires was encyclopaedic and, as a journalist turned business analyst, I admired this knowledge a lot. I remember talking to him about the Russian and Ukrainian news feeds that the World Service subscribes to. These wires are in Cyrillic and, at the time of our conversation, which took place in Café Nero in Old Broadcasting House over some very strong coffee, ingesting non-Latin news feeds in the BBC's newsroom system was a daunting task.

But for Andy it was doable.

Moreover, beyond the technical points involved in making the undoable doable, Andy was perhaps the only person in BBC Design & Engineering interested in the fine points of world history illustrated by the codes of those Cyrillic wires: TASS, for example, founded soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, was an acronym for the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (Sovetsky Soyuz). After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin had it renamed ITAR - Information Telegraph Agency of Russia. But Putin returned the agency to its historical TASS name, more evocative of the former power of the Soviets. Decades of history were distilled in those Cyrillic wire codes and Andy had the intellectual curiosity to dig into this history and the generosity to share his finds. 

His kindness and generosity always went way beyond any expectation.