Blogs

Today's installment in our Meet the Developers series is Andrew Tridgell, or Tridge as he is universally known. He's one of a handful of "real programmers" on our team (it's his day job; most of us do something by day) who bring world-class software techniques to the project. I've learned a huge amount from him, including a lot of good advice on managing community development projects, which is what Tridge does with Samba.

Over to him!

Name: Andrew Tridgell

Home: Canberra, Australia

DIY Drones role: Works closely with Doug Weibel on MAVLink, APM and library development. Also leading the scripting and automatic testing initiative, along with lots of bug fixes.

Day Job:  Working on the Samba project (www.samba.org) as a software engineer for IBM. I also teach part time at the Australian National University.

Background: I have been working on free software projects for 20 years, mostly related to system software and networking protocols. Before starting to work on free software full time I was a researcher and lecturer in computer science.

Interests: Right now I'm completely obsessed with building UAVs, but it is a very recent obsession, buying my first RC plane just 5 months ago. I got interested in UAVs after hearing about a local team entering the Outback Challenge at a meeting of our local maker group . I thought it would be a great project, and I now spend a couple of hours each night and most weekends working on the project.

I've found that working on APM with the diydrones community is the most fun project I have ever worked on. I think this will be a long term obsession!