> whoami
WHOAMI
I'm Chris. I learned HTML when I was 17 in about 1995, but didn't really turn it into much until I launched my first proper website a couple of years later. I learned VRML in 1998, which was a hot topic at the time and I figured it was the future, which tells you roughly what my tech predictions are worth.
I started programming with perl first, then VB6, and PHP not long after. I spent about twenty five years as a frontend dev but I'm not really one any more, which is worth saying out loud because it's the sort of thing people otherwise discover three replies into a disagreement. These days I manage fullstack teams at a decent sized tech company. Frontend is my own specialism rather than theirs.
I was CTO of a startup once. I raised some VC money. The main thing I learned from the experience is that I really don't enjoy running a startup. That's a useful thing to find out about yourself but quite an expensive lesson. Now I'm mostly trying to be some sort of amalgamation of the best managers I've had, and the manager I wish I'd had the rest of the time.
This site is where the good stories go. Tech, frontend, and how the web came to be the way it is: things that misbehaved and what they turned out to be, decisions that made sense at the time and then stopped, and the occasional piece of archaeology from an era I was present for.
It's a notebook, not a portfolio. Pieces arrive when something is worth writing down, which isn't on a schedule. When I'm not doing any of that I do a bit of wildlife photography and I play video games on Easy mode.
Everywhere else I'm onion2k.