Drew Fisher's website

I'm a technology enthusiast, and this is my homepage. I want to build load-bearing systems that survive me.

I'm currently taking some time off from employment while I write the 2025 MIT Mystery Hunt. I co-lead our Tech subteam.

I was a software engineer at Google for five years, working on Fuchsia, a modern operating system that aims to bring object capabilities to real systems (among other things). On the Security team, I maintained zxcrypt, our encrypted storage driver, worked on applying the Principle of Least Authority to the runtime environment we expose to programs, and implemented verified execution controls. On the Foundation Infrastructure team, I did lots of work on reliability for both the OS itself and our CI infrastructure provisioning devices, improved build and test times, and root-caused and reverted hundreds of regressions.

Before that, I worked at Stripe building better tools for the hard, important parts of running a business on the internet. I worked largely on our internal monetization platform.

Before that, I worked at Sandstorm building a usable and secure platform for running web apps. I did a bit of everything: core platform features, UX, developer tooling, documentation, the whole nine yards.

Before that, I worked at AeroFS, building usable collaboration tools for enterprises. I touched everything from distributed algorithms and performance tuning to security and packaging software for all three major desktop platforms.

I studied security and human-computer interaction at the University of California at Berkeley, where I earned my master's degree. I was co-advised by David Wagner and Björn Hartmann.

I enjoy all sorts of random electronics and software projects. Below, you'll find some examples that I've worked on long enough to merit a writeup.

• I'm a founding member of the Berkeley Campus League of Puzzlers. We write puzzlehunts.
• OpenKinect, the community developing open-source Kinect drivers. I've worked on reverse-engineering, documenting, and implementing both the camera command set and the audio protocol.
• My blog, affectionately titled the Shortlog. I wrote the original engine in an hour as an exercise in both Python and forcing myself to deliver code. Now, I write entries about the minutia of my life and add features to the engine as needed.
• A USB adapter for a SNES controller, no driver installation required.
• Whitepages V3, a program I wrote for the Texas A&M Honors Housing Community to collect residents' contact information and produce a document for publication to be distributed throughout the dorm, with as little manual document-editing labor as possible.
• A DDR Pad that has no moving parts that was built as part of an embedded design project, with pictures and design explanation.
• An Assassins/Paranoia (see Wikipedia explanation of the game) game generator, with further information on the mathematics of the game.
• A tartan pattern simulator for exploring tartan designs.

Here are my projects on GitHub.

My resume is here.

My email address is drew.m.fisher@gmail.com. My PGP public key id is 9AA232D6F1C7C38E. I am in the strong set, and you can download my key here.