About

A senior engineering shop, since 2012.

Blue Oak Interactive, LLC is an engineering shop based in Asheville, North Carolina, founded by Andy Giles in July 2012. Fourteen years of building web software for organizations that want a senior engineer holding both the business problem and the code, not a layer of project managers between the two. The model is the same now as it was at the start: deep client relationships, multi-year engagements, and the technical depth to ship hard things in production.

01 Senior engineering, established Asheville NC, July 2012

Founded in July 2012

Blue Oak Interactive was founded in Asheville, North Carolina in July 2012. The company started as a senior-led Drupal development practice and has grown into a full engineering shop covering Drupal, modern JavaScript (Next.js, React, Vue, Hono), AI consulting and development, and Linux infrastructure work. The thread running through fourteen years of engagements is the same: we keep the engineering scope tight enough that a senior engineer can hold the whole picture, and we stay in long enough that the codebase stays healthy.

The clients we work with tend to need software to solve real operational problems: e-commerce platforms with custom logistics, theological education platforms with thousands of hours of course content, lab equipment companies with PIM and content needs, partner-management applications with embedded interactive UI, and sales reporting dashboards built into existing application stacks. The work is usually a multi-year relationship rather than a one-shot project.

02 Founder and senior engineer

Andy Giles, founder

Andy Giles founded Blue Oak Interactive in July 2012 and has led the company's engagements since. Sixteen years on Drupal.org under the username andyg5000, with hands-on work spanning Drupal 5 through current major versions. Backend specialty, with deep work in Drupal Commerce: payment gateways, shipping carrier integrations, tax service connectors, and the API integration patterns (OAuth flows, webhook signature verification, idempotency, rate-limit handling) that production e-commerce work eventually requires.

Beyond Drupal, Andy works across modern JavaScript frameworks, AI infrastructure (on-prem GPU clusters, Bedrock deployments, agent harnesses), and Linux systems administration. The throughline across stacks is the same engineering discipline: strict typing where the language supports it, modern testing, infrastructure-as-code, and an unwillingness to ship integrations where the failure modes haven't been mapped.

Andy is a Silver Drupal Certified Partner (through Dripyard), a Drupal Association Individual Member, and a regular speaker on the Drupal Camp and DrupalCon circuit. In 2025 he co-founded Dripyard with Drupal core maintainer Mike Herchel; Dripyard ships premium Drupal themes built to WCAG 2.2 AA standards and is Blue Oak Interactive's sister theming practice.

Andy Giles, founder of Blue Oak Interactive
Andy Giles, founder. Photo via Dripyard.
03 Sixteen years on Drupal.org and active in the community

Open source and the Drupal community

Andy maintains 40+ projects on Drupal.org, with a heavy concentration in the Drupal Commerce ecosystem: Commerce Braintree, Commerce FedEx, Commerce UPS, Commerce USPS, Commerce ShipStation, Commerce Box, Commerce Shipping 3.x, Commerce Simple Addressbook, Commerce Status Alert, Honeypot Submit, Tableit, ZURB Template, Lock Field Values, Twig SDC Tools, and others. The published organizational work lives at drupal.org/blue-oak-interactive; the Dripyard theming work lives at drupal.org/dripyard.

Community involvement extends beyond the contrib queue. Andy is mentored by and has worked closely with rszrama, bojanz, mglaman, and ultimike on Commerce and core work, and now mentors a handful of contributors moving into the project. Blue Oak Interactive has sponsored Drupal Camp Asheville every year from 2020 through 2024; Andy organized the 2022 edition. Recent and upcoming speaking and attendance includes DrupalCon Baltimore (2017), Nashville (2018), Barcelona (2024), Atlanta (2025), and Chicago (2026), plus Florida DrupalCamp 2026 and the Drupal Nebraska April 2026 meetup.

Andy has appeared on the Talking Drupal podcast multiple times, both as a guest host (episode 535) and as a guest discussing Dripyard's launch (episode 520), Composer Patches 2.0 (episode 536), and agentic development workflows (episode 538).

04 Multi-year client engagements, not project sprints

Long-term partnerships

The work that defines Blue Oak Interactive is the multi-year engagement. Biblical Training has been a client for twelve years, evolving from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 to a current headless deployment with Drupal as the editorial backbone for a Next.js front end serving thousands of hours of theological course content. Ankom Technology has been a client for ten years; we run their e-commerce, PIM, and content strategy work on Drupal. Education Partners International has been a client for eight years; their platform is a partially decoupled Drupal application with embedded Vue components handling the interactive UI surfaces.

Other named engagements include Rhino Networks, where we built a sales dashboard reporting system in React inside their existing application stack, and Dripyard, the sister theming practice Andy co-founded in 2025 — Dripyard's licensing and package-distribution API runs on Hono on Cloudflare Workers, built and maintained by Blue Oak Interactive.

The reason to mention this is not the logos. It's that long client relationships are how we work. Multi-year engagements give the codebase a chance to stay coherent, give the integrations time to age into something durable, and give the senior engineer doing the work the institutional knowledge to keep moving fast without breaking what's already there.