Who is Chris Punches?

But first, who am I, and why should you care what I think?

I Live In software, infrastructure, and architecture.

Well, for starters, I’ve been immersed in both software engineering and systems design and engineering since about 2003, and I’ve been coding since 1994. I’m the original author of the long shelved HUMOSINT project, which was a workflow automation tool for a hybrid of OSINT and HUMINT discipline methodologies. This was, of course, during very different times when the world was very new to the internet, so, the same product today would not be nearly as useful.

At the age of 32, that’s having been coding off and on for 20 years, having been totally immersed in software and systems for 14 years, and having been a total nerd since like forever as off and on I’ve picked up a few unrelated specializations that are also nerdly (like intel studies).

During that time I’ve worked on some of the largest corporate systems on Earth, in some of the largest infrastructures on Earth, as well as large non-profit environments to even small startups. The scale has so far depended on the client and the need.

My people live in software, infrastructure, and architecture, and you probably recognize their names.

In addition to that, if you’re in enterprise, I know, and have known many years, many different contributors to many of the products fellow engineers are probably currently using in your own environments, or people who are directly employed by companies who make or sell those products. I know the Apache teams. I know the Nginx teams. I know the Fedora teams. I know the CentOS teams. I know the SUSE teams. I know the Arch Linux teams. I know the Slackware teams. I know the Hadoop teams. I know the gitlab teams. I know Linux kernel contributors. I know the Ubuntu teams. The engineers and architects behind AWS. I keep company among engineers and architects at prominent insurance providers, tech giants, even some reknowned big data research companies. The list does go on, and some I’m not even allowed to talk about. I think you get the point, though: Most of my life is spent talking to the very people who create the software we all love and use in our environments, and most of those conversations revolve around how the creators of those products intended those products to be used as an extension of millions of people actively evolving the standards and practices over decades that are taught to the people using that software.

I Actively Design, Develop, and Release software.

Aside from my 9-5 where I am employed as a consultant, I regularly architect, develop, release, and maintain new products to keep myself sharp, including just in the last few months:

Pofapi — A functional client API for POF.com for developers as a proof of concept to base interactive tools on (released recently)

Ivory Tower — GTD-centric task management software for the Linux Desktop (released recently)

ZNC IRC Logviewer — A php-driven publication system that interfaces with your ZNC bouncer’s logging features, allowing you to bridge the IRC gap for your users (released recently)

HOWDI — a prototype tool for scraping and chaining open proxy lists, providing almost 20,000 at once with filters removed (in alpha)

As to products currently being worked on:

SURRO Linux — A Linux distribution not yet released.

Conditional Response Daemon — A component that provides a new approach to systems orchestration (In Progress),

And more. You can peruse the "Current Projects" page of this blog to see what else I’m working on these days.

I actively develop in C, C++, Python, Bash, Powershell, C#, CMD, and in the older days for me it was JavaScript, Perl, Pascal, and TCL (though don’t ask me to remember any of that).

# My specialization is Windows and Linux Operating Systems, and making them do big things in big environments.

Most people know I’m enthusiastic about Linux systems and always have been, but I’m also a Windows specialist. I actually got my corporate start in a Windows Infrastructure and am intimately familiar with Windows OS’s, and have had conversations that ended with changes to .NET framework classes.

While most people who know me consider me to be a “systems guy”, I’m very much also aware of development best practices, and I’ve advised Fortune 100 enterprises for entity-wide transformations in this area, and I’ve won awards and have been recognized for this because I know what I’m doing.

I also love tooting my own horn, long walks on the beach, and rare beers.