About Tom Moertel

Tom Moertel has been writing software for about twenty years. His work has been used in defense, financial, and industrial applications and ranges from OS-level code to shrink-wrapped consumer software to software systems that handle million-dollar forecasts.

In 1998 he founded Moertel Consulting, a consultancy that focuses on solving difficult problems. His motivation was to offer clients problem-solving services that are becoming increasingly rare in today's computing industry. With much of the industry moving toward a few common frameworks and development methods, many difficult and uncommon problems – the ones that don't "fit the mold" – are given little consideration until they threaten projects. These problems are Moertel Consulting's specialty.

Education and professional associations

Tom holds a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University and has partial completion of an MBA, also from PSU. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (both since 1990). His professional interests include functional programming, the analysis of algorithms and data structures, optimization, and performance engineering.

Online

Read Tom Moertel's weblog.

If you really want to know more about Tom, you can learn a lot by searching for his name on the Internet. For starters, here are a few links to bite-sized examples of his work:

• LectroTest, a specification-based, automated testing system for Perl
• PXSL, the Parsimonious XML Shorthand Language (a language Tom created to make data-centric XML applications easier)
• Refactoring XSLT one-offs with PXSL
• Tom's entry in ICFP 2001 programming contest
• Robot Visualization and Analysis Toolkit for ICFP 2002 programming contest
• "Seven Lessons from the ICFP Programming Contest" for Kuro5hin.org (it's entertaining)
• Cheating Hangman game in Literate Haskell and in Perl
• RPMs for a variety of statistics and programming-related software packages
• "A Coder's Guide to Coffee"

PGP/GPG key

You may download Tom's key (0766A455) from the usual key servers. Here is a link to his key on pgp.mit.edu. His key's fingerprint is as follows:

31E1 422C 88B4 9037 C659 D001 41CE B2AA 0766 A455