About

Hello! I’m Chris Parlette. I live in Silver Spring, MD with my wife and dog. In my spare time, I like to solve Rubik's Cubes and other twisty puzzles, lift weights in my basement gym, cook, play bass guitar, play board games and video games, run and play in D&D 5e campaigns, and play with technology. I mostly listen to punk, ska, and metal music. I usually read about personal finance, fitness, technology news, and NFL news.

Health

I have been Type 1 diabetic since the age of 3, and have had an insulin pump since the age of 14. I was diagnosed with low testosterone in 2019, and have been on TRT since then. I started working out in 2010, then started building a home gym in 2012.

Career

I attended the University of Maryland at College Park from 2002-2006. My major was Computer Science, and I took economics courses as my upper-level concentration. I lettered in marching band, and was in the pep band all 4 years as a tenor sax player.

During college, I worked on campus doing IT for the Institute for Physical Science and Technology. My senior year, I got a job at the same company my father worked for, Plan B Technologies, doing Citrix implementations as a consultant. This was where I picked up a lot about Windows Server administration, enterprise software installation and setup, and physical server installation.

I then joined a startup called Zenoss, which developed monitoring software. I was first hired to be customer support, then moved to the professional services team. Zenoss was written fully in Python, so I learned a lot about Python development, the Zope framework, MySQL management, Linux servers, and customer support.

Next, I joined a smaller monitoring startup called Circonus. This was a spinoff of a consulting company called OmniTI. I was hired to be both a pre-sales engineer and a post-sales services/support person. This taught me a lot about giving good product demos, the sales process, distributed systems, running a successful proof-of-concept for potential customers, Solaris servers, and how much could get done with a very small development team. This was also my first exposure to how a SaaS platform could be used for hosting many customers on one deployment.

After Circonus, I was hired to a cloud management platform company called CloudBolt. I knew my boss at CloudBolt from my days at Zenoss, which helped show me that a professional network can bear fruit many years after it's sown. At CloudBolt, I was again a combination of pre-sales and post-sales. This was again a python application, this time using the Django framework, which I quickly came to like much more than Zope. This also began my introduction into many different cloud providers and their services.

Next was getting hired at ParkMyCloud, which is a cloud cost management tool. ParkMyCloud is a SaaS platform written in Python and Go. This was a 7-person company, so I was hired to be a sales engineer, but I ended up helping with marketing, sales, product development, product planning, meetup organizing, and anything else that was needed. ParkMyCloud was acquired by Turbonomic in May 2019, which was my first exposure to company acquisitions and stock transfers.

Next, I became a Senior Solutions Architect at Yotascale, a cloud cost allocation and reporting tool. This tool is used by enterprises with large AWS and Azure cloud footprints, so I was able to work with some huge cloud bills and help allocate the costs to divisions and groups. Many of the cost allocation tasks revolved around Kubernetes deployments.

Building on my exposure to Kubernetes, I then became the first Senior Solutions Architect at TriggerMesh. TriggerMesh helps users build event-driven applications by converting all events into the CloudEvents specification, then transforming and routing those events to their targets. Since this is entirely deployed on Kubernetes using Knative, I was able to learn much more about cluster management and deployment.

Family

My wife and I met in marching band at the University of Maryland, then got married in 2008. We had one dog for many years named Figo, a German Shorthair Pointer. Our next dog was Lulu, a Shepherd mix. We currently have 1 dog named Wednesday, who is a Boxer mix. I have 2 older brothers and one younger sister, and a multitude of siblings-in-law, step-siblings-in-law, nieces, nephews, and cousins. Most of my direct family is in Maryland, and most of my in-laws are in Michigan, but there are many spread all around the world as well.

Side Projects

In my free time, I enjoy working on programming projects. I mainly create apps in Python using the Flask framework. Games are typically made in Godot, since the scripting language in Godot is very Python-like. Here are a few of the projects I've made:

  • TrackYourStrength - A fitness tracking application written in Python using Flask. The production deployment fully runs on AWS using ECS for running application containers and RDS as the database. Container builds and deployment use Github Actions that trigger off of git tags.

  • Cosmic Trading Crew - A multiplayer space trading game written in Godot. The central Godot server runs on AWS EC2, and clients are built for Android/Windows/Linux/OSX.

  • Trichromancy - A single player deck building game written in Godot with an in-browser playable version.

  • Always Tell Me The Odds - A space survival sim written in Godot for the GitHub Game Off 2020 game jam.

  • CarbLoader - A frantic bread delivery game written in Godot for the Godot Wild Jam #26 game jam.