Andrew Frederick Cowie

rmc, BEng

Andrew Cowie is a long time Linux engineer, but—somewhat unusually—started his career as an infantry officer in the Canadian army, having graduated from Royal Military College, Kingston with a degree in engineering physics. He saw service across North America and a tour in the former Yugoslavia. He later ran operations for a mobile internet company in Manhattan and was a part of recovering the firm after the Sept 11 attacks.

Moving to Australia he founded a consulting firm helping a worldwide clientèle on their operations management. Specializing in planning and executing major upgrades to critical infrastructure, he gained significant experience helping startups solve difficult problems in uncertain and complex environments.

He later worked as head of engineering at a hosting company where designed and deployed a scalable infrastructure and established Haskell as the working language for all internal systems. Moving into financial services, he was an engineering manager in the Systems Engineering group at Commonwealth Bank with accountability for operations and engineering on their Big Data™ analytics platform and later led the integration between containerized infrastructure and cyber security. More recently he was VP Engineering at an innovative AI startup where he successfully re-architected their entire production system, grew a talented team of Haskell developers and systems engineers, and dramatically improved development velocity, increased platform availability, and reduced infrastructure cost.

The common thread has been a focus on platform engineering and helping advance systems reliability, observability, and performance. Andrew is now Principal Engineer at Apkudo working on their circular industry robotics platform.

The British Library, photo by Steve Cadman via http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevecadman/486263551/

On the technical side, Andrew is a strong open source advocate and contributed to the GNOME Desktop for many years. Past experience includes coding in C, Perl, and Java, then for almost ten years concentrated heavily in Haskell and had experience both as a developer himself and in growing people to be able to use functional programming in team settings. Previous work emphasized reliable distributed systems; lately he has been focused on tools for engineers, developing publishing toolchains for building better technical documentation, and is now doing original work in Rust on a new domain specific language for procedures.

Computer Keyboard, photo by Christian Wiediger via Unsplash

Andrew has experience as a corporate director, having served on the boards of international organizations promoting excellence, leadership, and innovation amongst youth; advocating Linux; and promoting Open Source professionals’ interests. Andrew has also been a frequent conference speaker, presenting about increasing the level of professionalism in the operations world and encouraging people to pursue the cause of freedom—in software and in the world beyond.

Berlin Technic Museum, photo by Andrew Cowie

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