About Me and My Site

Me First

The three of us

Crystal, Ashli, and some guy.

My name is Chris Wells, I'm 47 years old, and I'm from Georgia. I spend the majority of my free time with my fiancée, Crystal, and youngster, Ashli. My hobbies pretty much all revolve around technology, but I do venture out when I can. For more details about me and my personal life, check out my blog.

In my paid time, I work in Nokia Software's Applications Engineering division on the Converged Charging product. I have 23 years of experience building and adapting support solutions for dozens of white-box and OEM PC manufacturers as well as ISPs and telcos. I've worked on projects for a variety of U.S. clients including AT&T, Office Depot, Sprint, SBC, MCI, and Frontier plus foreign clients such as Bell Canada, Telecom New Zealand, and Telstra. To learn more about my professional life, you can check out my LinkedIn profile.

My Site

I've spent a lot of time building websites and software to other people's specs in order to meet their needs. While this leads to excellent end results, it can leave something to be desired on a personal level:

  1. Sometimes it's nice to build something from scratch and to have full creative control over it from beginning to end.
  2. Timelines in the corporate world are rarely long enough to address all the details as well as you'd like.
  3. Not every product or site makes it to market whether that's intentional (e.g., internal or restricted apps) or not. When you're proud of the work you do, it's rewarding to be able to share it with others.
  4. Products die, sites get overhauled, and things change. That's the nature of the IT world and it keeps us all busy, but it also means your portfolio gets outdated almost as fast as you can build it.
Playground in the cloud

My playground in "the cloud."

This site gives me the opportunity to overcome those issues. I'm not an artist in the typical sense of the word, but there's an art to what I do and I enjoy practicing that art. Since I'm not a "graphics guy," it doesn't bother me if my site isn't pretty or fancy-looking. It's the underlying architecture that I take pride in. I can build what I want, how I want, in as much time as I can spare. If I want my site to do something, I add the functionality. If I don't like the way it works, I change it. When I want to share something with the world, I have a place to do so. It's my personal playground in the cloud.