Hey, I'm Chris.

Let's get started.

I've had a passion for computers since my early years. I remember finding "101 BASIC Computer Games" at a book sale in Baltimore when I was 7 and learning about BASIC. When I was 14, I started learning a bit of C so that I could make patches to a game I enjoyed.

This passion followed and guided me to Georgia Tech and to its Computer Science department. Through Python and Smalltalk, Assembly and C, algorithms and object-oriented design, my college courses kept reaffirming my love for software. I also realized the following:

"An application can do amazing things, but if no one can use it, it's completely useless."

With this realization, I switched from my focus on platforms (low-level computing) and began to focus on people: the most important component of software.

That focus has shaped the fifteen years since. I joined OxBlue as a software engineer, grew into a lead, and now serve as its director of engineering, a path that has slowly carried me from building software to building the teams and the people who build it. It turns out that people are still the most important component, whether they're using the software or writing it.

I am still passionate about finding answers for people. It started in college, when I built a web-based application for the Georgia Tech Marching Band so that directors and staff assistants could manage the administrative side of ~350 students. I've kept building since: a customer portal so that a company's users could request licenses, place orders, and submit support tickets; an office check-in app to make a hybrid policy a little less painful; and a handful of smaller things, like a tool that builds a HIIT-friendly workout track, simply because they were fun to make.

Somewhere along the way, I found that I love sharing what I learn as much as building it. I've given talks at AtlantaPHP and other user groups on everything from Kubernetes to image manipulation to continuous delivery, and I've twice live-blogged the Laracon conference so that folks who couldn't be there could follow along. I've also spent time livestreaming for charity, raising over $10,000 for organizations like World Central Kitchen and Project HOPE.

My goal is to make a real and positive impact on the world.

Let's get started.