Welcome to my world.  It’s really not that bad of a place, actually.  My name is Chris Petersen and I’m proud to admit that I’m a bit of a nerd.

I graduated from the stereotypical social awkwardness a long time ago and now focus my attention on things that a lot of us 30-something recovering nerds enjoy:  family, food, friends, beer, and a little smattering of technology (I can’t stray too far from my roots).  That said, I’m still a total geek, in both the old nerdy definition as well as the newer “cool” meaning.

By trade, I’m an over-educated software engineer (most recently focusing on Perl and PHP, though I dabble in other languages like Java and Ruby).   I graduated from Whitman College in 1999 with a BA in Philosophy and minors in Religion and Psychology.  After a year working on an eventually-unsuccessful small business e-commerce project, I decided to head off to the University of Chicago for more schooling — right before the big dot-com boom.   By the time I had completed my MA (focusing on South Asian Anthropology) and returned home to the Northwest, the dot-com bust had happened, which left me struggling to find work as a developer.

I spent a one-year (to the day) stint at VersusLaw Inc., where I spent my days writing programs designed to go out and suck down legal information from various websites.  Not particularly interesting, though I did learn a fair amount.  Two hours after the layoff, I was hired on at Silicon Mechanics to write their ERP/CRM/e-commerce system and anything else that needed doing (inventory system, purchasing system, building the occasional 1u server, etc.).  After 5 great years at SiMech, I accepted a position closer to home with iFloor, where I worked on their ERP software and attempted to help to keep them at the forefront of online flooring sales.

In late 2008, I was offered a position at Marchex that would allow me to work with Java, a language I haven’t had a lot of opportunity to learn.  It was too good of an offer to turn down (even more so after hearing that iFloor went bankrupt 3 months after I left), and I bid farewell to my friends at iFloor.  Since then, my experience at Marchex has exposed me to Ruby and lately to IP telephony.

In my spare time, I tend to poke around with Perl, PHP, and other computer-related stuff.  I spend a fair amount of time working with open source software projects (I’m on the board and steering committee for MythTV),  and the software-related non-profit Schedules Direct.  I’m also on the board of the Seattle GNU Linux Conference and help out with technology infrastructure for Akili Dada, an educational charity that focuses on African girls.  When my wife and son can drag me away from my computers (I’m learning, slowly), I love to cook, brew beer, mead and hard cider, and do some experimental archeology (a.k.a. “medieval stuff”).