Chris Pappas

Full-Stack Software Developer

I call myself a “full-stack software developer” for a good reason! I am skilled at many aspects of web and software development, with a decade+ of experience in orgs both small and huge. My career has taken me to incredible places, and I have been fortunate to make so many lasting connections and friendships along the way.

I love working with CSS and JS/Typescript to produce high-quality interfaces and UX, using VueJS and React to bring my work to life. I employ back-end languages like Golang, PHP, and NodeJS, and frameworks like Laravel to build, iterate, and serve traffic quickly. I use Elasticsearch for full-text indexing and search, MySQL and MS SQL Server, AWS DynamoDB, and Google BigQuery databases, and Redis and Memcache for caching.

For hosting and serving my content, I deploy Serverless apps to AWS Lambda, static sites generated using Hugo to CloudFlare Pages, and run Linux servers on Linode and Digital Ocean. I have also deployed and maintained applications running on Kubernetes, from CI systems like Jenkins, Gitlab CI, Github Actions, and Buildkite.

I even love the challenge of working with the dark magic of complex Regular Expressions.

I appreciate well-formatted and nicely documented Git repos, messages, pull requests, and issue descriptions. I love using code formatting tools that produce well-formatted, consistent, and easy to read sources. I value automated testing and the confidence and quality that results from using it well.

Writing this down has reminded me of just how many things I’ve learned, and cool projects I’ve implemented and worked on throughout my career. What should I add next?

My Experience

Check out my full professional resume!

Team Lead/Staff Developer at Glacier FarmMedia and AgDealer.com

I recently boomeranged back to GFM to pick up where I left off, as the Tech Lead/Staff Engineer for AgDealer.com, a leading Ag Equipment buy-and-sell publication and website. This is truly a “full-stack” job, where I lead the dev team building everything including the Elasticsearch ingest pipeline, image thumbnail and watermarking AWS Lambda utility, RDS MS SQL Server databases, PHP Laravel app and job queue runners, VueJS frontend, and multiple admin applications and APIs. I even did a little bit of Coldfusion stuff for that “old-school” cred.

Key Tech: PHP, Laravel, VueJS, Elasticsearch, MS SQL Server, AWS Lambda, NodeJS

Senior Production Engineer at Shopify

In my most recent position at Shopify, I worked in Production Engineering on the Observability UX team, as a Senior Production Engineer, implementing an O11y platform using Grafana and Prometheus. My team and I developed custom Grafana plugins and I maintained our customized internal fork of Grafana, keeping it up to date with the upstream repo and implementing important features for our users. This system was used by thousands of developers and SREs daily to monitor production infrastructure, systems and apps across all of Shopify.

Grafana plugin and system development uses Golang, React and Typescript. I also contributed to a backend GraphQL API, background job runner, and Kafka consumer, built with Golang and using MySQL, BigQuery, and Google PubSub. All deployed to Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform using CI/CD with Buildkite, Docker, and Git.

Key Tech: Golang, React, Typescript, GraphQL, MySQL, BigQuery, Grafana, Prometheus, Kafka

I have also worked in many other roles and done a lot of interesting stuff, all detailed in my resume.