Who is Christopher?

Born in Canada, Christopher has always loved technology and computers. A generalist, he is driven by the need to learn new things. He is an entrepreneur, a solution provider, someone who enjoys test-driving new ideas and planning product roadmaps.

With a degree in electrical engineering and a masters in communication management he is a team player that has a unique ability to communicate with engineers, build roadmaps and contribute in more ways than a single employee can.

Currently, as the director of digital marketing at Keck Medicine of USC, his main focus is to add strategy to the competitive landscape of health care. Working with internal teams of developers, digital agencies and stakeholders he is able to craft product roadmaps, mentor staff, balance budget and help the organization move into the future.

"Perfect the things you know, rather than being consumed by the things you don't."

My Strengths

I have been in technology for more than 12 years and along the way I have managed to pick up a few skills. While knowledge of technology is important, communication, idea generation and leadership are qualities that are in high demand.

ME

Superhero

Awesome

Good

Newbie

85%

Leadership

95%

Communication

35%

Dev

65%

Curiosity

100%

Reliability

My projects

Quizbot - SMS Quiz Generator

This is an open source project that I felt passionate about. I have always found SMS texting and chat bots interesting and one day while sitting in a waiting room I thought, here we have a great opportunity to engage people - a captive audience. So I decided to make a quiz framework so that other people could replicate this project and just change-up the seed file to tailor it to their quiz theme. [Twillio's SMS services, Sinatra, Postgres]

Movietime - API exploration

This application makes searching for TV programs, movies and actors, fun! This is a full-stack application that leverages a community api: MovieDB. This quick project allowed me to explore API connectivity and integration in the rails environment. When the app first loads, there should be a list of popular TV shows (as determined by the API) and a search bar. Upon using the search bar, the user should see a list of shows that match the search criteria. After clicking on a TV show (from the search or main page) the user should be taken to a page with more information about that particular TV show. [Ruby on Rails, API, Postgres, MySQL]

Robot Repository - Ruby on Rails

First off, I love robots. More to the point though, in the environment I work in, we produce a lot of digital content. Content in this reference means stories, editorials, ads, brochures and basically anything an agency produces for websites, print, copy and essentially all that combines words with images. Here presents the problem, after a project has been completed and the product goes into production, all is forgotten. Is that so bad? Well, everything is fine until someone in your group says, “didn’t we write a story about this person last year?” Taking into account employee churn, people storing files locally and other inter-office procedural-oddities, you find yourself and your team scrambling for a printout, an email or some shred of evidence like Sherlock Holmes solving a murder mystery. The goal of the application is to provide some automation or robotic like process to the archiving and indexing of these valuable documents.
[Ruby on Rails, Elasticsearch, AWS S3]

Gym Tracker - Alexa Skill

The Gym Tracker skill, on the Amazon Alexa service, allows a user to keep track of the days you go to the gym or workout. To invoke, just say “open gym tracker.” First-time users will be asked to determine their timezone to assist with date tracking. When you use “gym tracker” Alexa will ask you if “you are off to the gym?” A simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ will store the date and time. Feel free to ask Gym Tracker by saying “Alexa, ask gym tracker how many times have I been to the gym” or “how many times have I been to the gym since February 2018” and Alexa will tell you. It’s perfect if you are paying a trainer and wonder how many sessions you’ve used. To reset the gym count, just say “reset gym tracker.”
[Node.js, AWS Lambda, AWS DynamoDB and Alexa-SDK]

My Skills and Education Milestones

Over the last couple of years I have been working almost exclusively with the Ruby language and the Rails framework. That has further been supported in Javascript and the jQuery framework. I love programing. I felt like like I was swimming against the current when I first began using Ruby on Rails becuase of all the helpers and shortcuts. It was only until recently that I have fully embraced the elegance of the language.

University of Southern California - Master of Communication Management Focus on Digital Strategy and Online Community Management

BLOC - Software Engineering apprenticeship and bootcamp

Florida Institute of Technology, Certificate program, IT Management

University of Saskatchewan, Canada - Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering

Say Hello!

Based in Los Angeles, California, and more specifically, Sherman Oaks (because LA is a big place!) feel free to reach out if you have questions, want to say hello, or have an opportunity to discuss!