Photo of me (left), and my wife Angie (right)
Contact Info
- Nickname: I go by "Brewer" as "Matt" is a nearly useless identifier
- Email: "mbrewer" at this domain (this is the best way to contact me)
- Mailing (ICBM) Address: 5 State Street, apt 2, Montpelier VT, 05602
- Phone: 478-2BREWER (478-227-3937)
- Callsign: KB1PMC
- Google Chat: "mbrewer" at this domain
- Facebook: search for "mbrewer" at this domain
- IRC: I hang out on irc.freenode.net, when I'm online
- PGP root key fingerprint: 1139 1C9B 3BF7 F7EF 6396 545C E0E4 6085 5FB8 CA86
- PGP email key fingerprint: 7E66 EC34 1BB0 718E C2B1 97E6 04F0 C4DE 981B 109A
Certifications/Qualifications
Outdoor
- Wilderness First Responder
- Technical Rope Rescue, Technician (expired)
- Swiftwater Rescue, Advanced (expired)
- HAM radio operator, Technician
Tech
- Bacholors in CS from Carnegie Mellon University
Experience
Outdoor
- 1500 miles on the AT in 2009
- Through-hike of JMT summer 2012
- Lived in a truck in the national forests for >2 years
Tech
- 4 Summers at UMASS working on mobile robot systems
- 1 Summer at the National Robotics Engineering Center testing Flash Lidar for use on mobile robotics
- 1 Summer at the Parallel Data Lab (CMU) working on the Self-* distributed filesystem
- 2 semesters TA for physics (also involving teaching python) at CMU
- 2 semesters TA for 15-410 (writing a kernel from scratch) at CMU
- Site Reliability Engineer at Google for >5 years, Tech Lead, level T5 (Senior Engineer)
- Sole Site Reliability Engineer for Meteor Development Group , for ~2 years, an open source company building a thick-client javascript framework and distributed container based hosting environment.
Hobbies
- See my blog for what I spend much of my time doing. It's focused primarilly on outdoors, bushcraft, and homesteading stuff, but other things creep in occasionally.
- Backpacking and bushcraft: Hiking thousands of miles, bushwhacking, carrying minimal gear, starting fires with a fire drill, sleeping under the stars, tanning hides, throwing sling, archery, etc.
- Homesteading knowledge: How to *do* things. This is an extension of the bushcraft interests into slightly higher technology. I'd love to learn to work with horses, and I love old farm machinery, how to rotate crops, how to use pigs as plows, etc.
- Instruments: guitar and vocals, both of many styles. I also dabble in bamboo flute and penny whistle. Check out some tabs here .
- 4-wheeling and truck living: Why use a hotel when you have an offroad camper and can sleep deep on a backroad for free! I've got a highlift on the roof and tools in the back, and am slowly learning how to repair it.
- Rock climbing: sport and trad, and I was certified in technical rope rescue and swiftwater rescue at one point
- Other sports I enjoy and am okay at: spelunking, whitewater kayaking, canoeing, skiing, ultimate frisbee, parkour, sailing, running, mountain biking, street biking.
- Sports I want to learn: Most things, some specific examples though, sailing, sailboarding, sea kayaking, surfing, free-diving, car racing.
- Computer stuff: Writing quick code, admin'ing my own systems, designing new and better kernels , systems, and programming languages , exploring anonymity and security (what if the government were after you?). I also have a technical blog .
- Puzzle solving: MIT mystery hunt and that sort of thing
- Other activities: urban exploration, gaming, "making", wandering, climbing trees, reading, or... you know, whatever :P.
What am I doing with my life?
- See my outdoors blog .
- And my technical blog .
Links