About
Born in the late 1970's in the south of England to a Teacher and a Engineering Manager, Chris grew up in the 80's and 90's to the sounds WAM, McHammer and later Ocean Colour Scene and Radiohead.
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In Primtary school he focussed on building dens in the woods with friends, and played a little with BBC basic on a microcomputer, and played Elite with his friend. In secondary school cognitive games like Civ and Transport Tycoon took his interest. His Dev career started here with an early Extract-Transform-Load project, a project with a real customer. The school physics department, and databases: SQL. He found solace in the choir and learned to enjoy classical and choral music.
The first period at uni covered Mechanical engineering starting in the late 90's. He enjoyed snapping metal bars under a variety of temperatures and loads, and blowing steam through turbines to get data for thermodynamic calculations. During this period he focussed on applied maths and light use of C/C++. He enjoyed learning manual draftsmanship. He joined the (large) gospel choir and broadened his appreciation of musical styles.
Subsequently to Uni he worked in UK work permits office for a short while, and then a small local engineering firm on the design team, before joining a chemical engineering corporate on the grad program. During the program, he covered corporate governance, Health and Safety Law and practice, Operations stability and shutdowns, Reliability and Overhaul, and Project management/business case and Plant installation. Data analysis experience here covered live and historic thermodynamic data for plant performance, and failure risk assessment. He attained Chartered status with the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.
At the end of this he got married and left engineering to go to medical school. After 5 years he finished, and he and his wife had their first child. Throughout this period he played with home networks and built home file servers. He also explored algorithms and their efficiency. After another 5 years he had another baby with his wife, became a GP (family doctor), and developed a fascination with C++, algorithms and smart data structures. There was a brief foray into bitcoin, which inturn triggered an interest in economics.
He currently works as a family doctor, spending time with his children, teaching them through garden produce, DIY woodwork projects, Arduino and Python. In the years to the end of the Covid period he has focussed heavily on Python, Maths, Data Science and Machine Learning with a view to what data can teach us. He is also strongly interested in building green infrastructure at home and climate science.