Stephen R. Savitzky, Computer Curmudgeon

PLEASE NOTE: I have retired from software development, and only do it for fun or for friends.

I regard programming as a craft -- one of the "useful arts" -- and I have been practicing and perfecting that craft for nearly half a century. No matter what my job title may be, I have always been primarily a toolmaker, and enjoy putting together the kind of small, useful things that people will take for granted because they "just work". You can find many of them in my "Swiss Army" build system, MakeStuff.

I have recent experience with web development in Java (with Spring, Jackson, JUnit, etc.), Perl, embedded systems programming on Debian Linux, build management and website deployment with git, maven, GNU make and bash, and server monitoring with Nagios. Languages used within the last decade also include smaller projects in Lisp, Javascript, C, PHP, and Python. There are some large C++ and assembly language projects in my more distant past. I may be one of the few people to have written object-oriented code with a macro assembler, or to have designed a Turing-complete functional programming language with XML syntax (PIA).

I'm an experienced communicator and presenter, and greatly enjoy mentoring my colleagues (it was an IT person from India who gave me the title of "guru") and teaching them about leading-edge technologies: meta-assemblers and real-time kernels at Zilog; object-oriented programming and cross-platform development at Advansoft Research; application frameworks, open source, Linux, CVS, git, XML, and web services at Ricoh Innovations; I've helped several teams make the transition to git. I've been deeply involved in several large technology transfers from research to production.

I have an MS degree in computer science from Stanford and several decades of industry experience including Unix and Linux system administration, CPU and software architecture, and the design and implementation of web servers, web sites, microservices, secure file transfer protocols, cloud services, encrypted document storage systems, programming languages, operating system kernels, text editors, and so on.

I am listed as a co-inventor on 40-odd patents (search here), and have written a book on Real-Time Microprocessor Systems (1985). I have also recorded and self-published a CD called Coffee, Computers, and Song!.

It's been almost a decade since I retired from my job as an SDE at Amazon, and have almost recovered from burnout. I've been primarily working on a few personal projects (you can find most of those on GitHub). I have also moved to the Netherlands (as of late 2024), where I'm devoting most of my work time to my family, my cats, and a small multimedia publishing company, HyperSpace Express. I might be available for a small consulting or tech writing gig, but don't count on it, and don't even bother if I wouldn't recognize your name. My email address is in the footer.