Chris Were
I'm a full-stack developer, specialising in rapid development of custom web applications.
Bio
I have been working as a full-stack software engineer since 2002, building high quality, scalable solutions for the web across a wide range of industries.
While I have built companies and built development teams, my ultimate passion is building software and tackling new problems. From a technical perspective I'm most proud of building; Cloud framework (Rappsio), Realtime Twitter search engine (Mozzler), RSS Aggregator (Feedtagger).
Excellent communication with all stakeholders is critical to the success of software development projects. I take pride in ensuring I have a complete understanding of the project objectives and seek to minimise risks throughout the development process.
With many years experience working in startup environments, I acutely understand the importance of making technology decisions inline with the current priorities of the business. No only that, but it's essential to retain as much flexibility in the process as priorities regularly change.
While I have a preferred technology stack, ultimately I choose the best technologies for the job at hand and use my experience to identify relevant design patterns.
I am always keen to get involved at all stages of a project or application lifecycle.
Common services: Develop Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Cutting code, Scoping requirements, Infrastructure design & implementation, Database design, Building tech teams.
Chris is a fantastic software engineer. His understanding of the tools, how they fit with common software patterns, and even the human-component of software development is impeccable.
We brought Chris on to solve some tough problems with an existing code-base. He was able to quickly identify the root causes, offer solutions, and ultimately resolve all of our issues.
I definitely recommend Chris for any software engineering role including architectural and leadership positions.
— Alex Joyce
I had the privilege of working with Chris for almost 3 years. As the CEO of the company, he was a great leader who drove the growth of the business successfully and rapidly.
He is a passionate and aspiring entrepreneur with the capability of identifying innovative ideas and opportunities, then turning them into real products and profitable businesses, thanks to his great talent and extensive experiences in IT industry.
Chris is one of the genuine role models that I have learnt from in my career. He definitely earns my highest recommendation.
— John Zheng
Chris and I worked together designing and building out digital systems for business use in the eCommerce space, and I found Chris’s professionalism and willingness to problem solve fantastic.
With his experience as a full stack dev, running teams and directing projects, Chris was able to suggest sound ideas for improving our product and manage expectations of junior workers, and I enjoyed being able to get things done quickly and effectively.
I would happily work with Chris again on developing out future products that require a mature developers mindset to create.
— Stuart Austin
Chris is not only a great mentor, patient and very giving of his time, but also an eager learner.
I always felt working with Chris was an exchange of ideas that led to a sum that was greater than parts.
— Sera McGill
Portfolio
Rappsio
— Founder & CEO
Jul 2015 - Current
Founder of the Rappsio platform, a new way of developing web applications in the cloud. The cloud framework can deliver everything from a traditional website through to a complete business solution.
This project involves:
- Rapid prototyping / proof of concept development
- Product development
- Financial management
- System architecture design and implementation
- Infrastructure management
- UX design
- Software development
- System administration
- Marketing / messaging experiments
- Customer interviews
Community Data Solutions
— Co-Founder & CEO
Jan 2010 - Jun 2015
Co-Founder and CEO of Community Data Solutions, providing information management solutions to Australian Non-Profit orgnasiations. The company grew to over 15 staff and 1000’s of users during my five years leading the company.
Being a startup, responsibilities covered all areas of the business:
- Product development
- Financial management
- Building software engineering team
- Establishing company culture
- Business analyst
- System architecture design and implementation
- Performance and security monitoring
- Process improvement
http://www.communityds.com.au/
Exited in 2016
Mozzler
— Founder
Oct 2009 - Apr 2010
Mozzler was an experimental real-time news search engine utilising Twitter which processes several terabytes of data per month.
In September 2009 the website was launched at the “Real-time Techcrunch” conference in San Francisco. A video of this launch can be found here (from 6.5 minutes).
This project required creating large scale web indexing tools to scrap relevant content from the web, while dealing with large amounts of data - making it searchable in near real-time.
There were many interesting challenges around scaling the solution and using the (at the time) experimental Cassandra document store.
Marketech
— Lead Software Engineer
Mar 2007 - Nov 2009
I was the lead software engineer at Marketech, an online CFD broker, based in Perth. This role involved scoping features, managing the implementation and development of new software, implementing existing Open Source software and productivity tools within the company.
I was responsible for re-architecting the existing trading software to be highly scalable and performant, using experience gained in the FeedTagger project.
Newsalerts
— Founder
Aug 2006 - Oct 2007
Newsalerts is an online service providing email notifications when a company appears in any Australian newspaper, leading Australian financial website - or when the company makes an ASX announcement.
Exited in 2007.
FeedTagger
— Founder
Feb 2005 - Sep 2005
Founder of experimental news platform FeedTagger. An RSS aggregator with an emphasis on navigation by tags.
After initially launching and gaining 1000 users in it’s first week, the service was re-archicted to scale - using techniques pioneered by Google and FriendFeed.
Google then launched Google Reader which was almost identicial in functionality, so the project was shut down.
See the original site on archive.org