Drew Varner
Principal at US Army
South Carolina, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDrew Varner is a Principal software engineer with over two decades of experience applying disciplined engineering to complex cloud, security, and systems problems for both commercial and government clients. He leads large-scale design, development, testing, and deployment efforts at NineFX while drawing on prior senior consulting roles at Oracle and BEA and operational cyber experience as a US Army Cyber Warfare Officer. Drew pairs deep hands-on backend expertise—demonstrated by contributions to the high-performance open-source VerneMQ MQTT broker, where he improved ECC support, WebSocket handling, webhooks, and observability—with pragmatic security and DevOps practices. He has a Master of Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of South Carolina and a history of supporting logistics and frequency-management missions for DoD in the Middle East, showing an uncommon blend of technical, operational, and diplomatic experience. Colleagues rely on him for technical guidance on reliability and security in distributed systems and for turning ambiguous, mission-critical requirements into auditable, production-ready solutions.
12 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Lexington High SchoolMaster of Engineering (M.Eng.) Computer Science and Engineering, Master of Engineering (M.Eng.) Computer Science and Engineering at University of South CarolinaBaylor University
Stackoverflow
56reputation
753reached
2answers
1question
Github Skills (30)
brokers10
erlang10
messaging10
webhooks10
mqtt10
broker10
websocket10
mqttnet10
websockets-client10
cryptography10
websocket-client10
client-websocket10
security9
industrial9
distributed-systems9
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
vernemq/vernemq
Aug 2020 - Oct 2022
A distributed MQTT message broker based on Erlang/OTP. Built for high quality & Industrial use cases. The VerneMQ mission is active & the project maintained. Thank you for your support!
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 31 commits, 27 PRs in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Drew primarily contributed to the back-end functionality of the VerneMQ broker, focusing on enhancing security and improving its robustness. Their work includes implementing named curves for elliptic curve cryptography, which enhances the security features. They also fixed issues related to WebSocket protocol handling and made enhancements to the webhook system, introducing HTTPS-specific options such as CRL checking and client certificate authentication. Furthermore, they contributed to the metrics collection, making the system more observable.
casesindustrial-ioterlangindustrial-communicationmessage-queue
NineFX/elixir-fips
Jul 2017 - Apr 2020
Elixir with FIPS 140-2 crypto support
Contributions:3 PRs, 2 pushes, 3 branches in 2 years 9 months
cryptographyfips-140-2fips-140elixircrypto
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