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Overview

I’m a software developer and nerd. My background is mostly in systems development. In the years befog the web took off, mostly in shrink-wrap software, primarily in Unix/C Later, I worked on mostly hosted solutions, mostly in Java, with a bit of Python along the way. Lately I’ve been playing around with Scala, but haven’t used it in a production setting yet. Generally speaking, I’ve tended to work more in “open systems”, Unix, Linux, Java, etc. Mostly out of a prejudice towards systems I could figure out rather than relying on “vendor black magic.”

Contact Info

I generally can be best reached via email at drew@drewsudell.org, which I read daily. For contact information in various formats, see my contact page.

Outside of this site, I have profiles on linkedin, google plus, facebook, delicious, twitter, and mastodon.

Work Background

Way back, I started working at Step-Saver Data Systems, building billing systems for small medial and legal offices. At Feith Systems, I got involved in Document Imaging, as well as porting Novell Netware to Unix. Later I built systems and performance monitoring tools at Platinum technology, where I acquired a recurring interest in systems monitoring. After Platinum was acquired by Computer Associates, I spent a brief spell building an on-line insurance application system at Healthaxis. I built electronic wallets and payment processing systems for a few years at Trintech. Since then I’ve mostly been working on a ever expanding e-commerce platform at GSI Commerce (recently a division of EBay), But took a detour to build a demand-side ad platform at Invite Media, which has since been acquired by Google. At the time of this writing, I’ve recently transitioned over to Navteq to work on traffic analysis, a “big data” problem if there ever was one.

For all the details, see the on-line edition of my resume.

Academic Background

At this point in life, I’d hardly consider myself an academic. However, my undergrad work as in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Pennsylvania, where I received a Bachelors of Arts. Much of what I once knew about Astrophysics is probably obsolete, if not wrong, by now. Having said that it was a great broad technical background and produced a great story about how I got into computing.

Eventually, I decided I wanted a more formal background in computing and received a Masters in Science from Villanova University in Computer Science. My Independent Study, Design and Implementation of a Tuple-Space Server in Java is on-line. Less for it’s inherent interest than because it is tied up historically in the creation of this site.

Interests

Generally my technical interests tend to the nerdy: operating systems, distributed systems, programming languages, embedded systems and the like. The info section of this site is my set of curated links and pretty much expresses that. Outside of computing, I’m interested in reading (mostly heavy weight history, science, and technology) and music (primarily alternative folk, indie, and classical).

Organizations

I’m currently a member of a number of professional organizations, and encourage others to participate. These include the ACM, IEEE Computer Society and Usenix. Locally, I participate in the Philly JUG, PHASE, and have started to attend Conshohocken.rb. I’d like to be active in Philly Lambda, but for some reason I never seem to be free when there are meetings, so I merely lurk on the mailing list.