Chris became interested in computers at an early age; he vividly remembers playing the Oregon Trail on the Apple IIs at his elementary school. That cursory interest progressed into a love for computer programming while he was in high school in the early 90s. While taking a class on HyperCard, his teacher suggested that he might have an aptitude for programming and suggested Pascal. Chris managed to get a copy of Turbo Pascal and with the assistance of a few friends learned object-oriented programming. Chris and his friends then started a club for Pascal programming competitions.
When Barberton High School opened it's super computing lab, Chris was nominated as an ideal candidate for the associated class. That class introduced him to C programming, the Internet, and web development. The lab, provided in part by NASA, had an SGI UNIX machine where the school's website was hosted and where Chris published his first web pages.
Since high school and college, Chris has worked for a few local companies where he has designed web-based applications. He has worked with the full range of web technologies, including: SQL, ColdFusion, Python, PHP, Flash, as well as the standard HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. Along the way he has also functioned as a systems administrator and has managed various types of operating systems, though most of that experience is with high-end systems running UNIX, VMS, BSD, and Linux.
His systems and integration expertise led him into the role of SAP roll out coordinator for IT when his company switched from their legacy ERP system. Since the company's SAP equipment was located in Germany he was generally not able to assist the detailed internal configuration of SAP; his roles was to be the local IT expert that could identify a wide variety of issues and coordinate their resolution with headquarters. This experience taught him much about effectively communicating highly technical issues across language, cultural, and time barriers. The skill he showed in this project led the business to invite him to provide oversight on the SAP roll out project that they were to tackle in Mexico.
Chris currently functions as a software engineer and uses Agile/Lean techniques to create SAP ABAP and web-based applications.
Philosophy
Chris maintains three major concerns when designing or rehabilitating computer systems.
Usable: First, he always strives to create usable systems. Computer systems are complicated, and too many of those systems expose their complexity to the users. Chris believes that it is always possible to hide an application's complexity from the users and leave them with a clean, intuitive interface. This design goal has many positive consequences, the most important being that training costs are lowered and that data inconsistencies are greatly reduced.
Efficient: Second, Chris endeavors to create efficient systems. This ideology is heavily influenced by his web technologies experience and formal computer science education. He teaches junior analysts and programmers the significance of algorithm selection as well as the importance of attention to details. Overall system efficiency is hard to measure, which is why many large businesses unwittingly choose seemingly cheaper, less efficient systems that in the end cause them to make much more costly purchases. For example, if a computer system's network impact is not evaluated along with the purchase price, the business could get tied to a solution that requires them to upgrade their communication lines in order to support it. The cost of business class communication adds up quickly and will in many cases more than offset the cost of purchasing costlier, more efficient system.
Standard: Finally, Chris demands that systems be made in a standards compliant manner. When it comes to web technologies, the use of standards is the best way to ensure that a web page created today will continue to work on the next generation of web browsers. This also reduces overall maintenance costs as many bugs are caught when evaluating web pages for standards compliance.
Personal Life
When he is not working, attending classes, or studying, Chris enjoys spending time with his wife and children. They enjoy soccer, cooking, playing board games, and occasionally playing video games together. When time allows, he also pursues his own hobbies of violin, reading, and history.
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