Background Information

Overview

My background is building commercial software systems. Primarily, I've done this in the Unix world. I've spent the better part of the last 15 years noodling around Unix and Networking. Most of my work has traditionally been in C, with a smattering of C++. Over the last 4 or 5 years, I've been concentrating on Java.

Employment history

I started out working at Step-Saver Data Systems, building billing systems for small medical offices. I spent a number of years at Feith Systems and Software, where I was involved with building Document Imaging systems, as well as porting Novell Netware for Unix. Later I worked for a four years at Platinum technology building system monitoring tools. After Platinum was acquired by Computer Associates, I did a brief tour in the "dot-com" world at HealthAxis, building a online insurance application system. I spent a couple of years, I've been building electronic wallets and dealing with payment processing at Trintech. Since Trintech cut back its US operations, I've been building e-commerce infrastructure at GSI Commerce.

For a more structured version of that story, my resume is online.

Interests

Along the way I've become interesting in a number of aspects of computing and software development.

• I'm interested in Operating Systems in general. Of course, I'm interested in Unix, but also interesting research Operating Systems such as Mach, Spring, Amoeba, and Sprite.
• Another general interest is distributed systems, in particular distributed shared memory. Of particular interest are tuple-space shared memories such as in the Linda Coordination language.
• I have a general interest in the software development process, particularly in light weight methodologies such as Scrum, XP and other Agile Methodologies.
• I'm also interested in development tools. In particular Source control systems, such as CVS or Perforce; test frameworks such as JUnit, and build tools such as Ant.
• I'm also interested in text processing and markup. As an avid LaTeX user, and an old troff geek, I find the rise of XML kind of interesting.
• I'm also interested in performance tuning and metrics, mostly as a side effect of my time a Platinum.

Organizations

I am currently a member of a number professional organizations, and encourage other to participate. These include Usenix, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the IEEE Computer Society. Locally, I'm also involved with the Philly Java Users Group (JUG).

Drew Sudell Last modified: Sun Mar 2 21:25:25 EST 2003