Me

I'm Chris Armstrong (also often Christopher Armstrong). This web site is Twisted Radix. My email address is radix@twistedmatrix.com.

Take a look at my resume if you wish to trade goods for services (I am currently employed by Canonical).

Programming

I'm a programmer, but not a Good Programmer, yet. I mostly like Python and Scheme, and am interested in the PyPy project.

hbaker (aka Henry Baker) is one of my heros.

See more about my programming at Code.

Bio

So, I guess bios are lame or whatever, but honestly, I can't remember what happened in my own life (I had to do a lot of research to get all the material in this thing!). So it's as much for me as it is for the Internet. Really!

I grew up in small Clinton, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. I dropped out of Morris University (in Moon Twp, PA) as well as the Community College of Allegheny County. My lack of formal higher education has not been problematic, given that I've been working professionally as a programmer since high school. When I was in university, I interned as an "IT dude" at NOVA Chemicals, a big evil plastics corporation. The day my internship was up, a guy I knew from Croatia asked if I wanted to go to Zagreb for a few months to work on some content management software for the Multimedia Institute. I guess this was in 2002 or so, when I was 18 (unfortunately, I have no blog posts from this period -- I think whatever blog I was using then got unrecoverably deleted. Yes, I use blog posts to remember what happened in my life).

I went to Zagreb for three months or so, drank a lot of beer (I was underage in the US at the time), got into an imagined skirmish over a girl with the guy I was living with, and generally had a blast. Oh man, I miss cevapcici and Tomislav beer.

A few months later, in 2003 I went to live on the outskirts of Washington, DC with Steve Waterbury. I think I helped him out with his NASA project a little bit. I also got to hang out with Jp Calderone and Jen Dockter during that period, since they also lived near DC at the time.

Later that year I went to Frankfurt, Germany to give training on Twisted to a small software company in the flight industry. That was pretty neat. Apple wine and frankfurters!

All was quiet for a while. I did some contracting and maybe played some drums, although that could be a fabrication. I think one of my clients was a homosexual woman from New England. She was cool. In early 2004 I talked to a guy who I had seen around on IRC. He wanted me to come work with him in Tasmania. An annoying number of months later, I got my Australian work visa. I was notified that I was permitted to enter the country on September 19. By the end of the month, I was in Hobart and blogging about how cool it was.

I loved Hobart. I lived with Jonathan Lange while I was there, and hung out a lot with Tim Stebbing. Jono introduced me to role playing (you know, like Dungeons and Dragons and HERO), and I learned how to work on a large project with a small team. The very best part of Australia, though, is the meat pies. Oh man, meat pies. Steak and tomato. Steak, bacon, and cheese. Steak and onion. I really miss those meat pies.

Unfortunately, the company I was with was pretty boring (and money-wise, not terribly stable), so I started looking for another job. I knew more than one person who worked for Canonical, so I applied and (after an annoyingly long interview process) got the job. Unfortunately since they're not an Australian company my chances of staying in Australia were slim, so I decided that since I could live anywhere I wanted, I would go where many of my friends are: Boston (or, well, Cambridge). I moved in the first part of 2006. Here I am.