Background Information

Overview

My background is mostly systems development. For many years that was mostly shrink-wrap software, primary on Unix and primarily in C. For the last dozen years, it was more web-based hosted solutions, primarily in Java, still on Unix/Linux. That probably reflects less a prejudice against Microsoft than a preference for systems that are more open to investigation rather than "vendor black magic." Along the way, I've probably noodled with more network protocols than a sensible person ought.

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, though I took a brief detour to build demand-side ad servers at a startup called Invite Media.

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 older versions of this page, I mentioned "source control systems, such as CVS or Perforce; test frameworks such as JUnit, and build tools such as Ant". Well that's world is changing faster than I bother to update this site. So, let's just say that there's really cool stuff out there and things like Maven or git are just some of the things I've played with a bit.
• 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.
• Languages are going through a renaissance. The gap between academic languages and big commercial languages is rapidly being filled. Python was a lot of fun. As I write this, I'm starting to fool with Scala, which combines most of what I loved about Scheme, with the things I liked about Erlang, and runs on the JVM: what Lisp machines wanted to be but where way too early.
• For years Database systems were interesting to me, though I've grown to despise all the commercial offerings. So, the NoSql movement has been getting some of my attention.

Organisations

I am currently a member of a number professional organisations, 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: Tue Jul 06 23:54:58 Eastern Daylight Time 2010