Sandstorm Blog

Introducing Drew and SF Meetup

By Drew Fisher - 04 May 2015

Hi! I’m Drew Fisher, and I’m thrilled to announce that I’m the newest sandcat on the block! I’ll be working on various parts of Sandstorm’s software platform, developer tools, and user experience.

A little bit about me:

• I’ve done triage for KDE, maintained Free Software reverse-engineered drivers for the Kinect depth camera and Microsoft Touch Mouse, and given a talk at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress.
• While at Texas A&M University, I led the Texas A&M University Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition team to nationals, ran a campus mirror of a number several Linux distribution archives, and was active in the local Linux Users Group.
• At UC Berkeley, I earned my MS in computer science studying security and human-computer interaction under Dave Wagner.
• I’ve built secure, private, and user-friendly collaboration tools at AeroFS.
• In my free time, I play and write puzzlehunts, fiddle with servers, bike, play board games, and enjoy eating delicious foods!

One of the reasons that I find Sandstorm so compelling is that I care deeply about security and privacy, but also about making delightful user experiences. These goals are frequently in conflict with each other, but Sandstorm is remarkable in that its design enables us to provide real security – isolation between orthogonal concerns, sandboxing, protections against whole classes of attacks – while also making that security useful and meaningful to users, by staying out of the way of user workflows, minimizing cognitive load, and capturing user intent instead of asking tons of questions.

Meetup on May 7

I’ll be at the first Sandstorm Meetup this Thursday, May 7, in San Francisco, so if you’re in the area, come visit the Thoughtworks office at 315 Montgomery from 6pm - 9pm! I look forward to meeting some new faces!