Lewis Cawthorne

Databases got me started with computers; part-time data entry in middle school. In high school I spent several years designing and maintaining a relational database and managing the network for a mail order company to replace their Microsoft Works "solution". The founder Paul Greer liked to joke that he taught me how to turn on a computer but forgot to show me how to turn one off.

That company ultimately started an ISP to fill the service gap in Hickory, NC. I performed the initial work to get it up and running, teaching myself and becoming certified by Microsoft on Windows NT, NT Server, NT Server in the Enterprise, Networking Essentials and TCP/IP in the process. It gave me hands on experience with a variety of routers and other networking equipment; both for internal company use and as an outsourced expert for corporate clients.

When through acquisitions we incorporated UN*X in our setup, I migrated naturally to the role of onsite 'guru' that handled any nontrivial Unix/Linux work in the mixed NT/Linux/Solaris environment, and I have also heavily used GNU/Linux (Arch, Gentoo and Ubuntu primarily) as my preferred OS at home. My position gave me the chance to do some programming in C and a good bit of web programming and scripting using Perl, but never enough.

Because writing code has always held a special interest for me, I went back to school and completed my Computer Science B.S. in Fall 2011 and Master of Engineering in Winter 2014 at the University of South Carolina to gain a more formal grounding in the art & science of computer programming. I currently have non-trivial programming experience in around 13 languages.

In addition to coursework and teaching, in school I spent a year or longer each on three different programming projects of note: a bioinformatics text mining application implementing natural language processing via the NLTK in Python with a Django web interface for administration and inspection of results, an Android application with database back-end that processes with a web XML steam to overlay emergency unit locations and provide related information and notifications, and a C program on an AWS instance that computes closures of a certain class of function under affine transformations plots the generated points to the browser for further analysis.