Chris' love of technology had its roots over 30 years ago when he had the opportunity to work on a TRS80 after school. He saved to purchase a Vic-20 several years later and has been adding to his collection of systems ever since.
Professionally, Chris has been in involved in IT for over 15 years. On the hardware and networking side, he has wired networks, configured servers and hardware, administered DNS and load balancing systems, and designed networks. On the software side, Chris has experience in all stages of the software development life cycle as programmer, documenter, tester, systems architect, manager, project manager.
He is fluent in VB.NET, ASP.NET, Perl, Python, Russian, Java, XML/XSLT and C++, among others, and has written applications and architected systems for the web, Windows, DOS, Linux/Unix, PalmOS (68k and Arm) and enhanced/interactive television set-top boxes.
Born on Cherry Pt MCAS, North Carolina, Chris travelled the world as son of a Navy doctor. He graduated from Iolani high school in Hawaii and went on to receive his bachelors degree from Virginia Tech in 1993.
After college, Chris worked as a Russian language translator and copy editor in Moscow, Russia. To earn extra rubles, he did freelance work on the side purchasing and setting up computer equipment, and connecting small companies to the Internet. Upon returning to the U.S., Chris worked for an engineering company that was working with partners in the U.S. and Russia to retrofit Luch satellites for use in telephony.
In 1997, Chris joined PBS corporate where he helped architect the high-performance, high-traffic web farm for what became, at one point, the world's largest .org website. Chris was part of the team that launched PBS Kids and worked with Mister Rogers to build his first web presence. He also architected the online search engine of the Lewis and Clark journals and collaborated with IBM to architect the PBS Olympic Cyberschool for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.
With the broadcast and web world converging, Chris ventured into PBS' early work with interactive and digital television. He authored PBS' ITV development guidelines and participated in the standardization work of ATVEF and ATSC DASE. This work culminated in delivering the keynote speech "The Future of Interactive Television" at the 2001 ATSC DASE Symposium hosted by NIST. The 50 year predictions he offered in that speech have yet to be proven wrong.
Chris has worked in the non-profit, municipal government, education, health-care and for-profit spheres, constantly focusing on how IT can better serve the respective business mission and goals.
In his free time, Chris teaches programming seminars and courses at the community college level and enjoys mentoring developers and speaking at conferences and code camps.