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You've Been Heard

165. How Drew Stone Turned His Farming Background Into an IT Career

You've Been Heard

Philip Howard

Tech News, Technology, Business, Management, News

0.00 Ratings

🗓️ 25 August 2022

⏱️ 62 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Drew Stone Drew Stone is the Director of IT and Data Security at True Velocity Ammunition. Coming from a farming background, Drew didn’t have a normal path to IT as a career. Instead, he ended up blending agriculture and IT before moving on to government work, then back to agriculture, before finding his way to True Velocity. How Drew Stone Turned His Farming Background Into an IT Career Today, we get to hear all about how and why agriculture technology is surprisingly bleeding edge, how the collection of data affects agriculture yields, and the innovations that Drew witnesses first-hand in ammunition technology.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds.

0:13.2

Today we've got Drew Stone with us.

0:16.5

So Drew, why don't you tell us a little about yourself? Sure. I'm Drew Stone. I'm the director of IT and data security at True Velocity Ammunition.

0:27.1

We make polymer-cased ammunition and, yeah, running an IT department for an ammo plant's just a little bit different than what you normally see in a lot of other places.

0:37.8

So thanks for having me on, Mike.

0:41.2

No problem.

0:42.4

That should be interesting.

0:44.0

So do me a favor.

0:45.2

Tell me a little bit about the career leading up to velocity and what it was like doing that.

0:51.2

And then if you jump in and tell us what's, you know,

0:54.5

yeah, what is different about doing IT at a manufacturer of ammunition?

1:02.1

Yeah, so my career kind of got started out a little bit strangely.

1:06.2

I'm actually an eighth generation farmer.

1:08.8

My family had been farming, excuse me, up in central Illinois

1:12.6

for quite a long time. And I worked out in the fields when I was younger, decided I quite

1:19.4

liked the air conditioning. So I tried to find a way to get indoors a little bit more and

1:25.9

had an act for computers. Our company was sort of acquired,

1:32.0

kind of partnered with by a larger corporation around the time I was in high school. And I had

1:38.2

up until then kind of been helping to maintain a lot of our IT infrastructure, keeping things together, helping out

1:45.4

our end users. And as the business grew, so did my role with that. And eventually by the time

1:51.5

I left for college, I was managing pretty much all aspects of our IT infrastructure. I went

1:58.5

off to college. I got scooped up by the government and did some stuff that I unfortunately can't really talk about right now.

...

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