About Chris Petersen

Welcome to my world. It's really not that bad of a place, actually.

My name is Chris Petersen, I'm 47, married to a wonderful woman, and an avid computer geek.

My life in a nutshell:

By trade, I'm an over-educated Perl/PHP programmer. I graduated from Whitman College in 1999 with a BA in Philosophy and minors in Religion and Psychology. After a year of struggling to find work, 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 in Social Sciences (my emphasis was South Asian Anthropology) and returned home to the Northwest, the dot-com bust had happened, and I struggled for four months trying to find work.

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. Two hours after the layoff, I was hired on at Silicon Mechanics to write their ERP/CRM/ecommerce 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.

In my spare time, I tend to poke around with Perl, PHP, and other computer-related stuff. When my wife can drag me away from my computers (I'm learning, slowly), I love to cook, brew mead and hard cider, and do some experimental archeology (a.k.a. "medieval stuff") with the Vanir-Lag, my friends in the SCA.