Hello! I’m Christian, the developer of this site.
I was born in Philadelphia, PA, in 1985 and moved with my family to Tampa, FL, in 1990 where I’ve lived ever since (aside from our international adventures). I’m the oldest of three brothers, and my youngest brother was born in Tampa the same year we moved.
You can learn more about me below, and you can use the navigation menu just above to jump to any particular spot.
Education:
High School:
I received a B.A. in Sociology from the University of South Florida, but my background prior to that and career since has been in computers and IT. Before college, I graduated from Tampa Bay Technical Vocational High School with a final major in Cisco networking, but my program’s curriculum changed three times during my time there.
Year one was electric theory with students on the electrician career path. This was 1999, and computers were still very much comprised of circuit boards with soldered components that could be manually tested and replaced. Even though I was enrolled in computer science, the theory was that basic knowledge of electrical concepts could still be valuable. We learned Ohm’s law, how to read electric diagrams and build the circuits they represent, and the differences between parallel versus serial circuits as well as alternating versus direct currents.
Year two was building and configuring computers. Again, this was 1998-1999 and these computers were not new so we were learning very important and fundamental computing concepts before they were buried under all the layers of abstraction that have come since then. Our first project was to team up and physically build two computers component-by-component from available parts, configure its BIOS, then install DOS from floppy disks. An unexpected bonus lesson was in hardware troubleshooting, because these parts were not well-kept and many were electrically shorted so to complete the task we had to learn how to quickly diagnose which component is failing and find a working replacement; knowing the difference between how a computer reacts when there’s no CPU versus no RAM could save a lot of time!
Our teacher retired during that sophomore year and we had substitute teachers for the rest of it. His replacement the following year came from a Cisco networking background and built new program geared towards setting students up to pass their CCNA exam immediately after graduation. There was a heavy focus on things like binary math, subnet calculations, Cisco device configurations, the OSI model, and a whole lot more, but I wasn’t able to see how it was useful or how it could be applied practically and so I didn’t find it particularly interesting.
My school was also the only one in the county that offered Japanese as a foreign language, and being how I am I wanted to most interesting and “out there” language to take for my graduation requirement. I eventually became the first student to ever progress to Japanese III and IV there, and worked as a teacher assistant embedded within the Japanese I and II classes since I was the only student at my level. I still credit that class and experience with my interest in Asian cultures and learning foreign languages that continues to this day.
College:
I skipped the fall semester after graduating high school and began attempting USF the following January. I didn’t have a major or even an idea of what I wanted to major in, I have wide-ranging interests and felt like I’d be happy with all of them.
My counselor during the spring orientation recommended I focus on general education requirements in the meantime, so that’s what I did for my first three years in search of a major. My guiding principal for class selection each semester was only what I found to be interesting, and so I took courses criminology, linguistics, physics, anthropology, psychology, geology, astronomy, history, literature, technical writing, mythology, musical history, film study, and more. Taking a technology course never occurred to me, probably cause I was already very technical outside of school.
I thought anthropology was interesting, but then when I took my first sociology course I knew that was the one. Through high school I’d attended seven different schools growing up, from expensive private schools to a vocational high school that was over 80% minority and predominantly working-class, and had become an astute observer of people, society and subcultures. I’d already been a sociologist most of my life!
I graduated cum laude in 2008 but knew I wasn’t going to pursue social work or higher education as career paths so I continued working my part-time college job until briefly working as an auto insurance claims adjuster until eventually finding my way back to IT in 2012.
Background:
My father was interested in computers as I grew up and so we always had one around, as well as early video game consoles like the NES the Atari 2600. My first computer actually preexisted me and was an IBM PCjr with a Basic ROM cartridge that loaded a Basic interpreter at boot. My earliest memories of that system was the Basic programming, introducing me very early on to core computer concepts.
We were early adopters of Windows 95 and the internet, first via The Microsoft Network and then later AOL. This was 1995 and the “world wide web” was just beginning, I was 10 years old then and the rest of my childhood became all about computers and the internet. My brother and I made our own websites back then on Geocities/Angelfire for our favorite movies and other things. I learned to use email from someone I met in a chat room, and spent hours of my time in those rooms like Nickelodeon’s “Blabatorium”. It was an amazing pairing of youthful curiosity with genuine world-changing technology and I absorbed it all like a sponge. That was what ultimate led me to apply for vocational school for computers.
By 2003 when I graduated high school the computer industry was changing. Dell, Gateway, Compaq and others were selling pre-built systems at low cost, whereas before people typically needed to pay a computer shop to build one. These pre-built systems also contained proprietary components that made repair more difficult, so between those two factors the local computer shops began to die out. I’d been learning Cisco networking for two years but was apathetic to it, so I enrolled in college instead of immediately pursuing a career.
Career:
In 2012 I started working for a business owner that at the time was alone and needed another employee to help with the volume of work. As a Managed Services Provider we were hired by local businesses that had IT infrastructure needing to be managed but not the resources to hire someone full-time. Our client base included lawyers, accountants, architectural and drafting firms, environmental modelers, mortgage companies, realtors, doctors, chiropractors, stores, and more.
I was in that position for ten years, and all of my prior life experiences including my Cisco background helped us build a suite of products and solutions to help those companies maximize their potential. Specifically I became specialized in networking concepts and worked a lot to architect and troubleshoot client office networks.
I became proficient in many areas, and became acquainted with countless technologies like SQL databases, web servers, encryption concepts (e.g., SSL certificates, data encryption, VPN), niche software, Active Directory, Office 365, Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, scripting, programming, and more.
Hobbies:
I am endlessly looking to learn and grow spiritually and individually. I love to learn, create, travel, and serve other people. I’ve been passionate about music for literally as long as I can remember, and can play or have trained on drums, guitar, piano, mandolin, ukulele, and bass (can’t seem to learn reed instruments though). My preferred creation mediums are cooking, music, and programming.
Music:
I got my first guitar around 10 years old but I’d wanted one for years before that. After some short-lived lessons I didn’t take it very seriously until around 16 when I restarted lessons. My older stepbrother was a drummer and he taught me to play drums, and my middle brother played bass and cello which I also dabbled in. Later I also owned a keyboard and purchased a 16-track digital recorder and an electric drum set and experimented with home recording during college.
I became a Christian during the last year of college and soon after joined Cypress Point Community Church where I played live worship music every Sunday for over 14 years, beginning on guitar before moving to bass and also playing drums occasionally.
Cooking:
I don’t exactly recall the origins of why, but I was interested in cooking by high school and it has become one of my main modes of creativity. Most people don’t think of cooking as a creative act, but I disagree and find it fun to explore new cuisines, dishes and recipies, which become building blocks for for creative expression: given n ingredients, what delicious food can you make?
I have a specific interest in break-making but often lack the proper environment to bake. Bread is fascinating to me, its history and the various styles you can make from the same base ingredients of salt, flour, water, and yeast (not all breads even need those!). Bread is also not as popular in other parts of the world, and one of my main hobbies while living in Thailand became trying to source high-protein wheat flour and make the best bread I could with that ingredients I could find there.
Programming:
Having been introduced to Basic at the youngest of ages I always had a sort of innate sense of what actually underpinned the software running on my computer, but it wasn’t until high school that I had my first real experiences with programming.
I had a graphing calculator for algebra and geometry classes, and hours of free time each day at school (our bus arrived at school an hour before school started, and left to take us back home two hours after school ended). In 10th grade I spent a lot of that time messing around on my calculator which used a form of Basic. Before the time when I could Google the answers, I had to instead through trial and error learn how it worked and eventually made a few programs to help with my math. One started with a menu screen where the user chose a geometrical shape, then something to calculate like area or perimeter, and then the program had the user input various known or unknown values to produce the result.
Since then I’ve dabbled in various frameworks and languages mostly for fun, including: JavaScript, Python, PHP, HTML, CSS, Java, C#, Bash, PowerShell, and probably more. I find programming to be a like building with Legos, except the parts are free and I can really build anything I want given time and focus.
Experiences:
I’ve been to Mexico, the Cayman Islands (and waved at Cuba as we passed), England, Scotland, Wales, France, Japan, Malaysia, Laos, and Thailand at various points over the years.
In high school my family went on a cruise that took me to the first of those two locations, only for parts of a day and only in very touristy parts of town, but it was still interesting. Later just after I graduated high school we went to Great Britain and France for two weeks, staying in London (England), Portsmouth (Wales), Edinburgh (Scotland), and La Havre (France). Smart phones wouldn’t be invented for another four years, so as we drove all around I was the one sitting in the back seat with the paper map of the country and guided us to where we needed to go.
After getting married in 2012 Georgia and I honeymooned for a week in London. In 2016 we went on out first mission trip, to Thailand where we conducted a week-long VBS program for about 30 kids from various homes. We returned again the following year, and decided at that time to plan for a year-long stay which we completed from late 2018 to late 2019. COVID-19 delayed any subsequent return trips until October 2022 when we finally reunited with the kids we lived with and called neighbors during our year there.
Though we’d committed to living in Thailand for a year, our visas were only for 90-day stays so we had to visit nearby countries three times to get new visas. First we visited Vientiane, Laos, which is probably the most common method for ex-pats living in Thailand. That trip coincided with Georgia’s 30th birthday, so we stayed an extra few days to take a mini holiday away from being a parent to seven Thai girls.
By the next visa run, the Thai consulate in Vientiane changed their procedure and we could no longer just get in line and be served, we needed an appointment ahead of time and all the appointments were scheduled too far out. We considered traveling west instead to Yangon, Myanmar, but another missionary couple we knew suggested Panang, Malaysia, and we stayed in Georgetown for our final two visa runs.
On our way back to the U.S. at the conclusion of our year in Thailand we stayed in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, Japan, for three nights, finally completing a wish I’d had since the first year of high school in Japanese class to visit Japan.
I’ve also gone skydiving!
