cg505 | christopher cooper

about me

I'm Christopher. I love to code and make music. I work as a software engineer. Want to get in touch?

code

For the past three years, I've worked as a software engineer at Databricks. I've been a part of multiple launches, and have supported a few more, as we've scaled our testing infrastructure to meet the needs of an engineering department that quadrupled in size. We've built a terabyte-scale distributed system of test execution and result processing that handled many millions of test results a day. My work has focused on release validation, automated test failure triage, and selecting high-signal tests for PR validation, among other smaller projects.

In 2020 I worked as one of two engineers on Blimp, the flagship product of the startup Kelda. Our goal was to streamline development in a microservice ecosystem by moving it into the cloud. Since the team was so small, I was simultaneously doing dev, ops, and product work. This meant that I wrote a lot of Go code, made architectural decisions, and became intimately familiar with the inner workings of Kubernetes. We got a few customers, but the project didn't pan out in the end. I still had a lot of fun working on it.

At UC Berkeley, I was a volunteer manager for the Open Computing Facility. As a Site Manager in spring 2020, I was one of two technical leads for the organization of 100+ volunteers and 8 paid staff. Before that, I served as a General Manager and a Deputy Site Manager, sharing responsibility for the computer lab of 29 computers and the array of servers which provide webhosting, high performance computing, and general server access to the Berkeley campus. (Kubernetes!) Check out some of the services that the OCF provides.

I spent the summer and fall of 2019 working at Brave. I worked on adding a cryptocurrency wallet manager to the browser, and also contributed to the core browser. You can see all my pull requets on GitHub.

I also have been a part of Political Computer Science @ Berkeley. I led the technical development of DARP, a project to analyse digital access and privacy rights around the world.

At Angie's List, I converted a price comparison tool from an outdated web stack to use Angie's List's new Thunderball stack (and along the way made some contributions to Thunderball itself). I also reworked some shared microservice Scala libraries for request processing.

I helped create kotct/dot, a tool for creating universally-available personal configurations, supporting GNU Emacs. This is my longest-running open project. You can find my own dot-compatible emacs config at cg505/.emacs.

I worked for two summers at Studio by Purdue, an application development team within Purdue University. During Summer 2016, I brought a new tool to life which exposed class and student data, contributing code from top (React/Redux) to bottom (ASP.NET). As the fall semester began, we deployed this app in time for my freshman class to use it during orientation. For Summer 2018, I focused on Passport, which is used widely at Purdue, as well as other institutions such as University of Arizona.

Interested more in my work? Check my resume. Impressed? Hire me!

music

I like jazz. In fall 2018, I played alto saxophone in a combo at UC Jazz with fellow Cal students. At Purdue I played alto sax in the Purdue Jazz Band. Check out our rendition of "Angel Eyes" featuring yours truly.

I listen to a lot of music, not just jazz. From Mitski to Tennyson to Jane Remover, I love to talk to other people who are always trying to discover that next album that they love. See my listening history on last.fm, or try one of my spotify playlists.

give me job

Interested in hiring me? Nice! I'm looking to expand my software engineering experience, which currently includes employers such as Databricks, Kelda, and Brave.

Check out my resume to find out more. Still here? Send me an email at christopher@cg505.com.

contact me

If you need to ahold of me for some reason, shoot me an email at my personal address, christopher@cg505.com.

Alternatively, you can attempt to reach me on linkedin, or by just piping the contents of your message to /dev/null. But, email is probably your best bet.