About & Resume

Hello! I’m Chris. I’m the principal engineer at Sunny Spot Labs, my company. I live in New York City and do a combination of professionally arguing with computers and improving engineering organizations. At this point I’ve a few decades doing it. I also write from time to time. As you might have guessed, I’m more of a senior IC/CTO-with-an-awesome-VP-of-engineering type. I also do consulting if you like something you’ve read.

I have a college degree (computer science) but didn’t stick around to get the PhD. Though I have coauthored several papers and I’ve professionally done research multiple times (networks/graphs & biology/proteins).

I’ve been the owner of my own business several times. Sometimes it’s even worked out well. Mostly not, though. Either way- I have a lot of stories.

I’m a huge fan of The Cult of Done. Specifically #9 “People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.” As such, I’ve done a lot of things at a lot of places, so here’s a sample of my focus areas and interests.

Areas of Interest

Organizational Development

Organizational effectiveness really matters to me. The most pernicious problems I’ve faced in my career have always been around how we think about people. By comparison, the technical parts are the easy ones. As a result, I’ve partnered with many other parts of the organization, especially People/HR, to find ways to improve our practices and collectively level up our capabilities.

General Software Engineering

I’ve written a solid amount of software at this point. You should totally go look at Github if you’d like to see a (quite small) snapshot of it. I’ve had the great fortune of working for a few places that really understood the heart of agile and it continues to inform how I approach my work. My professional experience includes Rust, Java, Ruby, Python, C, Javascript, TypeScript, Go, and a few others.

SRE & Operations

I’ve spent at least a decade focused on how to keep computers running. They’re like lemmings. My work here has included building visibility pipelines for monitoring & alerting, all manner of custom tooling for Linux, turning pallets of servers into functioning data centers, etc.

Network Managed Raspberry Pis

Security Engineering

Somehow I often wind up in the security wing of the org. I’ve worked for a public certificate authority. I’ve written a handy certificate authority tool in Ruby. Helped build a pretty fancy machine-learning-with-big-data based threat detection system for a payment company. Numerous additional other projects as well.

Data Science, Machine Learning, & Research

Spent a few years moving tons of bits around and applying analysis or experiments at scale. Sometimes this was with Hadoop or Spark, other times it’s JupyterLab. For deep learning I’m slightly more comfortable with TensorFlow, but I have also worked with PyTorch. I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but in related work I’ve made several D3 visualizations. I’ve coauthored several papers in networks & graphs related to wireless multihop signal routing as well as a handful of papers in computational structural biology and metagenomics. See my Google Scholar page for papers. Check out DeepFRI in particular for a web-based protein function identification service.