Hi, I’m Chris
I’m a technical services manager, maker, and serial over-engineer based in Madison, WI. By day I manage technical services for a CNC manufacturer in the area — a role that is part design, part software, part firefighting, and part explaining to very smart people why the thing that worked yesterday has opinions about today. It sits at the intersection of precision manufacturing and software, which means I spend a lot of time thinking about tolerances, systems, and why something that worked perfectly in testing has decided production is not its problem.
Outside of work, I build things that probably didn’t need to be built, and document them here so you can learn from my questionable decisions. My projects tend to start with a reasonable premise and end with a spreadsheet, three more questions than I started with, and a solution that is technically correct but hard to explain at a dinner party.
What I Do
I specialize in the dangerous overlap between hardware and software — the place where both camps assume the other one handled it. I work across embedded systems, wireless protocols, home automation, and whatever else seems like a good idea at 11pm. I have a particular fondness for reverse engineering things that weren’t designed to be reverse engineered, building infrastructure that is almost certainly overkill for a home lab, and writing documentation that I will absolutely not read when I need it six months later.
Philosophy
A few things I believe in, professionally and otherwise:
- Measure twice, build a test harness – A good solution is reproducible. A great solution has logs.
- Local first – If it requires a cloud subscription to turn on a light, it belongs in the trash.
- Behavioral evidence over documentation – What a system actually does is more interesting than what it was supposed to do.
- Complexity is a choice – Sometimes I make the wrong one. That’s usually what the blog post is about.
Get in Touch
If something here was useful, wrong, or inspired you to go build something inadvisable — I’d genuinely like to hear about it. Email is best. The comments are open and I try to respond, though I make no promises about turnaround when something is broken in the shop.