Brad House Photo

Brad House

Software Developer, Network Architect, System Administrator,
IT Manager/Director

About me

With almost 20 years of professional software development, network architecture, and management experience, I am seasoned, yet still invigorated by technologies. I love to learn new things, spread the knowledge I've gained to others, and apply my acquired skillset to products others can use and appreciate.

I am an avid open-source user, and like to contribute back to the community when time permits. Software and technology is not only my chosen career, but also my hobby. I feel staying involved in open source not only provides enjoyment, but hones my skills for use in my professional life.

Overview

Residence

Jacksonville, FL USA

Email

brad@brad-house.com

Telephone

+1 352 256 5614

Status

Employed

Experience

Monetra Technologies, LLC

CIO

November 2018 - September 2023

Duties

IT Management 85%
System Administration and CI/CD 95%
Network Architecture 90%
Secure Development and Network Awareness 100%
C Development 100%

In November 2018, Main Street Softworks Inc became Monetra Technologies LLC, taking on the name of our primary software offering, Monetra. This name transition also marked a shift in our focus away from general purpose payment software for merchants into services, and enterprise payment software.

As our focus changed, so did my core responsibilities. The shift involved an expansion to multiple datacenters and high-availability solutions utilizing BGP. This was in addition to my responsibilities as listed under Main Street Softworks, Inc.

Main Street Softworks, Inc

CTO

February 2001 - November 2018

Duties

IT Management 80%
System Administration and CI/CD 85%
Network Architecture 85%
Secure Development and Network Awareness 100%
C Development 100%

I co-founded Main Street Softworks, a leading provider of payment processing software for Linux, with two business partners in 2001. I was the sole developer for the first couple of years until we got our first big-name fortune 500 customer which afforded us the ability to expand.

As we grew, so did my responsibilities; I managed small teams of developers, IT staff, and support staff. I also architected our secure network and performed system administration duties as we introduced our SaaS offerings.

Projects

mStdLib co-author

2013 - present

mStdLib is an efficient and secure cross-platform C89 library meant to provide common library functions for data structures, safe data handling, event-based I/O, threading, SQL abstraction, and many others that are not part of the C standard. It allows for rapid application development in C while avoiding many of the pitfalls of programming in C by providing hard-to-misuse functions.

I co-developed this library with John Schember at Main Street Softworks (now Monetra Technologies) for many years before the initial public release under the MIT license in 2017.

c-ares maintainer

2017 - present

c-ares is an open-source asynchronous DNS resolver written in C, and deployed to millions of servers and devices around the world. We had been using this DNS resolver at Main Street Softworks for years, and I had contributed many patches to the project over the years. In March 2017 I was invited to be an official contributor and maintainer to the project.

While time limits my ability to contribute at the level I'd like to, I act as the primary reviewer for pull requests and responder to issues.

Gentoo Linux - amd64 project lead

2003-2004

Gentoo was a popular source-base linux distribution in the early 2000's supporting only x86. In late 2003, AMD released the first 64bit consumer processors, and I was an early adopter, but also a Gentoo user. Frustrated that I couldn't utilize my new system to the fullest potential, I started contributing patches to bring up full 64bit support.

By the end of the year, I was provided commit access under the handle brad_mssw to bring up the AMD64 port. The workload was great as Gentoo had no concept of multi-architecture support; massive changes were required to the Portage package manager, LiveCD build scripts, and Kernel build scripts (GenKernel). I was responsible not only for core Gentoo multi-architecture bring-up but also porting hundreds of packages to the AMD64 architecture, which could be as simple as recompiling, to applying patches other distributions were using, or writing custom patches to fix compilation and runtime issues for applications I had no prior knowledge of.

Eventually the port was in good shape and other developers had acquired suitable systems to help out. I left the Gentoo project to focus more on my company, Main Street Softworks; the work I had set out to do was done.

Get in touch

Contact details

Email

brad@brad-house.com

Telephone

+1 352 256 5614

Website

GitHub

Brad House

Software Developer, Network Architect, System Administrator, IT Manager/Director