Hi there! My name is Chris Brodt, and you’ve stumbled across my site, Uberbrodt.net. My day job is writing API’s and related things for Traitify from Chicago, IL. Outside of that, my hobbies are working on an old 1966 Mustang I drove halfway across the country, reading, music, cooking and eating good food, and trying to pay enough attention to my dog Otis. I am simultaneously the most responsible and irresponsible person you will know.

My professional interests of late are the Go programming language, hypermedia (REST) API’s, and learning more from and about the Software Craftsmanship movement. I’m tired of writing software with bugs, so I’ve been spending a lot of time reading and thinking about ways to not do that. A few books I’ve found enlighening to that regard are:

• xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code
• Working Effectively with Legacy Code
• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journyman to Master

I’ve done a few different things with my career. I started out working in a university library, and then my first real gig out of college was writing in-house CRM and sales automation software in Jacksonville FL. I did some consulting-ish work for a year or so, and then ended up working on Path.To, a site that proposed to match candiates to employers based on “fit” or “culture”. I have complicated feelings about what that means in practice, but I loved the team and the work we did. After that ended I went on to build Cassandra clusters for Bank of America, eventually getting the fancy-sounding title of VP of NoSQL Architecture. It was a great opportunity to do devops at a very large scale, and I learned a lot about reliability performance testing and NoSQL.

I’ve also been fortunate to work on a few side projects and companies, notably Eventhash and Aptvue. Eventhash was an app that aggregated social media around events (geo-fenced and through text analysis) and provided semantic information and notifications for organizers. Aptvue focused on giving businesses a way to use employee’s social media accounts for product evangelism and sales.

For the past two years, I’ve been working at Traitify, where we’re building new ways of assessing and utilizing personalities in sales, HR, and other contexts.