Drew Farris
Principal Director - Analytics & Artificial Intelligence at Manning Publications Co.
Maryland, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDrew Farris is a Principal Director specializing in analytics and AI with 16+ years building large-scale data engineering, information retrieval, and machine learning systems. He blends hands-on software architecture and backend engineering—especially distributed, high-throughput indexing and search—with practical NLP and unstructured data expertise, authoring content for "Taming Text." At Booz Allen he leads analytics/AI initiatives while contributing to major open-source projects such as Apache Accumulo and Mahout, where his work improved ingestion, query, and feature-extraction pipelines. Comfortable in C/Java/C++/Perl and Unix internals, he brings a rare mix of production-grade systems thinking and academic rigor from his Syracuse MS background. Notably, his commits show deep involvement in hardening continuous testing, garbage collection, and name-finding improvements—areas that often make or break large-scale text systems.
16 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
B.F.A, B.F.A at Syracuse UniversityM.S., M.S. at School of Information Studies, Syracuse University
Stackoverflow
36reputation
3kreached
2answers
0questions
Github Skills (29)
named-entity-extraction10
hadoop-mapreduce10
named-entity-recognition10
entity-extraction10
acc10
mahout10
back-end-development10
big-data10
mapreduce10
java10
data-ingestion10
javas10
data-processing10
text-processing10
nlp10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
tamingtext/book
Jan 2012 - Mar 2016
Taming Text Book Source Code
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:54 commits, 1 PR, 2 pushes in 4 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Drew primarily contributed to the `NameFinderTest.java` file, which tests the implementation of Named Entity Recognition (NER) using the OpenNLP library. Their work included updating the code to align with OpenNLP 1.5, incorporating multi-model name finding, and implementing custom feature generation. They also made changes to examples to demonstrate different approaches, including string pooling. The commits showcase the user's focus on improving the functionality and memory efficiency of the NER system within the context of text processing.
python
NationalSecurityAgency/datawave
Apr 2017 - Dec 2022
DataWave is an ingest/query framework that leverages Apache Accumulo to provide fast, secure data access.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:224 reviews, 130 commits, 99 PRs in 5 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Drew primarily contributed to the back-end of the project, focusing on data ingest and query functionality. Their work involved modifying the `FieldConfigHelper` class, implementing interfaces related to data ingestion, and updating code to handle specific edge cases related to data processing. Furthermore, the user worked on improving the codebase and fixing identified issues, such as the handling of null raw data in EventMapper and issues related to the JavaRegexAnalyzer.
querysecurebigdataaccumuloleverages
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