2010 – Publishing his First Mobile App
At 14 years old, Chris built his first mobile app using a first gen Mac Book Mini. He used Objective-C he learned from online tutorials and YouTube videos to display weather and recommend trending websites such as Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Weather.com. Some short time later he shifted his learning into the newer Swift language where he built many basic games and utilities.
2014 – Start of a Computer Science Degree & Why
In the 4th grade, Chris’ teacher had to ask him to stop raising his hand so other students could have a chance at answering questions. This is when he began noticing his eagerness and curiosities stemmed from math and science. His brain approached both problems and situations differently than his friends who pursued careers in business and the medical field. With a father who has his PhD in computer science from one a top university, Chris felt he was born into engineering the future.
2014 – 2017 – In the Classroom
Languages Learned: C++, C, Java, PHP, HTML/CSS/Javascript
Favorite Class: Programming Principles – programming business logic is almost binary, coming up with the most efficient way to solve a problem is an art
2017 – 2018 – Interning at a Fortune 500 Company
In 2017 Chris landed an internship with a company that ranked in the top 1% with over 50,000 employees. Here he began learning about databases and SQLServer. He wrote queries that calculated all the required ingredients of a solution by breaking down each solution until only elements in the periodic table existed. His work turned out so well, he was 1 of 3 interns out of thousands, that were asked to stay for another 6 months. During the last 6 months Chris worked on making these queries more easily accessible by creating an interface in Java for his fellow coworkers. Chris was asked to interview for a few full time positions with great pay but Chris knew he wanted to have a bigger impact so he respectfully declined.
2018 – Senior Thesis – Publishing Another Mobile App & Website
In 2018, Chris and a classmate were approached by a client of the college to create an app to help students study by forming study groups. This app would later be known as Study Companion and freshmen were required to enroll. After talking the idea completely through with the client and some added restrictions, it was decided to make an Android app. Chris and his partner had never done Android before but they knew Java so they got to work. It took many 13+ hour days over the course of 3 months. Using Android’s Gradle toolkit, Java, and Google Firebase Database that comes with a prebuilt REST API, they had published an app to Android’s Google Play Store that allowed classmates to talk to one another, setup study groups, and even give the ability to book conference rooms throughout the college library. While creating this app, Chris was still taking a web development class for fun! For his final web project he created a website to go hand in hand with Study Companion for those that did not have an Android. The team received high remarks from both the client and the professor overseeing the thesis before receiving a grade result of 97/100.
2018 – Graduating
Chris graduated with a 3.5/4.0 GPA with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.
2018 – Life at a Startup
A month after graduating, Chris took a full time position at a warehouse automation start up. He felt this was a place he could make the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time. His main job was debugging bot pickup and deliveries, package placements, routing and bot collision issues but he went where people needed him. He programmed analytic and log gathering systems in C# for a few teams. He even automated a teams upgrade process by creating a program in C# that installed and configured new updates itself. This position enabled Chris to practice cross team communication and receive asks from both his manager and other team managers. The issue with this position was Chris wanted to be on the front lines of product development which meant waiting another 8 months to change teams due to company policy.
2019 – From Learning the Ways of a Microsoft MVP to Team Lead
In April 2019, Chris was offered a mobile app development position from a rental and loaner software company with a startup type feel. The company was looking to really kick start their mobile app from a prototype that was made previously. This is where Chris strived. Mentored by a contracted Microsoft MVP which later became a friend, using Xamarin (a Microsoft cross platform language) he studied and practiced Xamarin at home and at work. Later that year Chris became the team lead of the team of 3. The team took this prototype with 3 buttons on a home page and transformed it into a customer facing, reservation allocator, barcode scanner, credit card processor, car inspector, PDF agreement signer mobile app and published it to the App Store. One customer reported they were able to get their customers payment method, signature, and into a car in an average of 15 seconds. From a technical standpoint this app was built off Xamarin and integrated with Nuget packages, our Rest API, 3rd party REST APIs, authentication tokens and multiple SDKs.
2020 – Fundas was Born – Publishing Another Mobile App
With the stock market showing over valued inflated stocks, Chris took a few algorithms he ran on stocks to find undervalued companies and decided to automate them. Hooking them up to a 3rd party REST API, he was able to pull company information such as balance sheets, 10ks, projections and prices to the finger tips of users and determine if the stock was undervalued. It also allowed users to save their favorite stocks and view news. He built this into a mobile Xamarin app called Fundas that appeared on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store for 2 years but was never marketed to anyone other than his friends. It was a great app to get a 100ft view of a company and weed out the weaklings. Fundas was removed from the store in 2022 to focus on other projects
2020 – The Start of Consulting
farmsimmods.com was Chris’ first big consulting project. This was designed to be a hub spot for gamers to go to download some of their most favorable mods. The website was built over the course of a few days using only HTML / CSS and Javascript connected to a Google Firebase Database.
Chris also created an app for a home delivery ice cream business that would receive orders from the app. This app was published to both the Google Play Store and the App Store built using Xamarin which also included a 3rd party emailing service.
Many of the other projects Chris has done are non disclosures which he cannot publicly talk about. Chris takes pride in his work and gives clients the up most privacy at their digression.
2021 – Heading to Another Fortune 500 Company
In 2021, the previous mobile app he had worked on for 2 years was coming to an end. With nothing more to do except maintenance Chris looked for another opportunity. 2 came to him. He was offered a position as a Senior Software Engineer to build a mobile app for another startup and an offer from a Fortune 500 company for a Software Engineering II position with a salary of 10k less than the first offer. Seems like an obvious answer of which to pick. Chris chose the Fortune 500 company. Why? because there is more to it than money and a title. It was for the experience to wear multiple hats, to be as impactful as possible, and most of all, learn the most in the shortest amount of time. Being in a subsidiary of the Fortune 500 company allowed all these things. It was never about the money.