avatar

Christopher Robison
Turning ideas into reality.

About

I love to code. There I've said it. Sure, I have a unique blend of technical know-how, leadership skills, and business acumen but my lifelong love is for coding. A little background about me: I have extensive experience in software engineering plus I've learned that I have a special skill: leading groups of unruly programmers. I am also skilled in a wide range of programming languages, including JavaScript, C, C++, Java, Python, Swift, Kotlin, Rust, Go and others. I have a proven track record of successfully meeting deadlines and delivering code that is robust and well tested. Most recently, I brought D. Harris Tours, a small transportation company, into the 21st century by modernizing their operations, resulting in a fleet expansion from 2 to 12 buses and a corresponding 10X increase in revenue. I could go on but I'm afraid I've said too much already 😁

Work Experience

D. Harris Tours, Inc.
San Francisco, CA
February 2020 – June 2024
CTO
  • Designed and implemented a end-to-end transportation management system
    • CRM
    • Scheduling (Drivers & Buses)
    • Automated Notifications (Phone, Email or SMS)
    • GPS Tracking of Assets
    • Invoicing
    • Payment Collection
    • Customer Portal
  • Spearheaded technological transformation and business processes that allowed D Harris to grow from a fleet of two buses to 14(!) buses.
  • Updated and enhanced the company's systems with modern tools to better manage the growing business, including real-time bus data, automated maintenance notifications, and automated trip confirmations and notifications via email and SMS.
  • Implemented route optimization algorithm to identify opportunities for one bus to handle multiple trips, increasing their daily revenue by 30%.
  • Implemented automated notifications for trips, bus maintenance, and billing and invoicing.
Highlights
  • (Re)defined processes and procedures for quoting, fulfilling and invoicing trips
  • Automated email/SMS notifications for trips, driver confirmations, bus maintenance
  • Automated billing and invoicing
  • Implemented USDOT required digital format driver logs
  • Increased daily revenue with better trip optimization
Conversant, Inc.
San Francisco, CA
July 2010 – February 2020
Manager, Software Engineering
Designed, developed, and maintained the infrastructure and code-base that served many millions of mobile and rich media ads each day. Led the Rich Media effort and helped modernize the ad serving infrastructure and metric collection. Designed and implemented a RESTful API for serving rich media ads and built out scalable backend services to handle integration with existing servers and infrastructure.
Highlights
  • Contributed to IAB MRAID 2.0 standard
  • Implemented MRAID SDK's on iOS and Android platforms
  • Developed and deployed mobile ad solutions for multiple platforms.
  • Designed and deployed 'Rich Media' ad delivery and reporting infrastructure.
  • Architected and deployed RESTful API for ad serving, tracking metrics and reporting.
  • Developed client-side Javascript 'ad controller' for mobile and web
  • Developed flexible metrics tracking with non-blocking endpoints
  • 10 years
Mindjet
San Francisco, CA
September 2007 – July 2010
Web Architect
Led Mindjet's initial Software as a Service (SaaS) product, Mindjet Catalyst. Transformed Mindjet's business model with the new service nearly doubling monthly revenue.
Highlights
  • Ported PHP website to ASP.NET
  • Ported Catalyst Flash client to standards based HTML5/canvas
  • Architected and led the team that implemented Mindjet Catalyst
Simple Software, Inc.
San Francisco, CA
April 2006 – September 2007
CEO / Founder
Mr. Robison provided contracted software development and consulting, developed the Simple Software Application Platform that provided content management systems and business process management applications to small to mid-sized businesses.
Highlights
  • GC Homes - Contractor documents and blueprints online.
  • Bay Docs - Document preparation services and tools for generating documentation for reverse mortgages
  • HUD Calculator - calculates potential reverse mortgage values
  • Tzero Technology - Custom content management system
  • Metrika - Custom content management system
Genetic Savings & Clone
Sausalito, CA
June 2004 – April 2006
VP Engineering
Genetic Savings & Clone was a genetic services company that offered commercial banking of genetic material as well as cloning services for cats. Responsible for architecting, developing and deploying Clonesoft, a bespoke business process automation software that ran every aspect of the company including employee and customer management, order tracking, tracking clone progress, and delivering the cloned pet to the customer.
Highlights
  • Cloned a cat and delivered it to customer
  • Clonesoft - Architected and implemented web-based business process application that was used to manage the animal gene banking and feline cloning business and automated many processes.
  • CatBank - http://www.catbank.org/ Designed and developed database driven feline DNA identification website. Back-end requirements included integration with specialized gene analysis hardware which included the Applied Biosystem Genetic Analyser 3130.
  • Created and analized pet genotyping database, identifying 7 unique markers for traits such as Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD), fur color, and polydactylism (6-toed cat).
  • Integration with gene analysis and sequencing hardware.
  • Retro vs. Metro - http://www.retrovsmetro.org/ Implemented all backend code for this online companion website to the New York Time's bestseller: Retro vs. Metro - The Great Political Divide in America. Required access and aggregation of various data items scattered across the Internet (such as the Iraq war dead count and real-time government deficit counter)
Inter@ctivate, Inc.
San Diego, CA
December 2001 – June 2004
Technical Director
As Technical Director for Interactivate, Inc., Mr. Robison's responsibilities were extensive and included, but were not limited to managing and maintaining IT resources including customer applications and websites. Help grow the company from 10 to 65 employees.
Highlights
  • Designed and architected network infrastructure using both Windows servers and various legacy Unix boxes. Built out server clusters and managed a farm of over 60 machines including a SAN.
  • Designed and implemented web-based network management, monitoring & systems analysis tools
  • Developed web-based tools for creation and maintenance of customer websites, DNS, and email services.
  • Designed and developed email marketing application using 3 tier architecture and XML and XSLT for transporting and rendering email messages and associated web pages. As of December, 2003, the Activatemail system sends and tracks over 1,000,000 requested messages per day between 89 clients including Sunkist Growers, The California Avocado Commission, San Diego Zoo and many more.
  • Setup automated development environment which allows Interactivate developers to create their own dedicated web sandboxes via a web interface. Automated CVS checkouts and local network mounts to development sandboxes rounded out this implementation.
  • Installation & administration of Solaris, FreeBSD & Windows NT in a heterogeneous environment
  • Design, implementation, migration and maintenance for Interactivate's internal and external network infrastructure.
  • Working with vendors, developers & 3rd party integrators.
  • Maintain and monitor over 50 hosted client web sites and dozens of web applications
  • Identifying & resolving network related problems
  • Responsible for backup implementation and recovery strategy & procedures
  • Required to support high volume access & availability characteristics as well as identifying & resolving system hardware & software problems
  • Responsible for the full availability of DNS, SMTP, HTTP, POP & IMAP servers
  • Maintaining security for all Interactivate networks

Awards

  • June 1988

    Paradise High School

    Computer Science Award

    First recipient of the Paradise High School "Computer Science Award" for developing a data application to track school resources that ran on an Apple IIe.

Volunteer

San Francisco Elks Lodge #3
April 2010 – April 2011
Esteemed Leading Knight / House Committee Chair
As Leading Knight and House Committee Chair I was responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Lodge restaurant and bar as well as organizing and holding events to raise money for local underprivileged children. During my tenure as House Committee Chair, with the help of the SFPD, we were able to build 100 bicycles to give as Christmas presents to children which were very well received. We raised over $34,000 for the children in that year.

Contact

San Francisco, CA
(415) 810-6991
cdr@cdr2.com
linkedin
crobison
twitter
thechrisrobison
github
chrisrobison

Education

  • 2009 2010

    City College of San Francisco

    Japanese, Business

  • 1988 1991

    California State University-Chico

    Computer Science

  • 1988 1990

    Butte Community College

    Computer Science, General Education

Skills

Programming Languages
python JavaScript [node+browser] Swift Kotlin Rust C C++ Java Objective-C PHP Python Perl Go C# Bash and more...
Leadership
Strategic Planning Team Building Team Leadership Procedure Development Process Improvement Product Development Entrepreneurship Budgeting / Financial Planning
Software Engineering
Best Practices Entrepreneurship Software Development Microservices Architecture Scrum / Agile Mobile Application Development Cloud Services Service Integration

Interests

Hobbies
Making stuff 3D Printing Raspberry Pi Arduino Laser engraving Electronics
Recreation
Golf Recreational Programming Karaoke

References

Chris has a broad understanding of Internet technologies and is generous with knowledge sharing. Equally at home working with Web Services, XMPP and server-side applications as he is working with CSS, JavaScript and the most recent HTML5 for devices. He brings a lot to a Web dev team and can pinch hit in a number of chairs.

This guy has some seriously mad coding skills.

His system is well oil; all my web services are working with no downtime. He offers all the greatest gadgets, ideal environment for a programmer like me.

Extreme knowledge of Perl and UNIX environment, fast programmer, brilliant manager.