My name is Chris Miller (get it? "tophermiller" I don't get it). I'm a software engineering manager based in Silicon Valley CA, specializing in the full stack for database-backed web applications. In acronyms, that means I do Java, SQL, JavaScript, HTML, CSS... I've also dabbled in many other languages and technologies over the years.

To keep current with new technology, and also for personal benefit, I have a number applications I've built in my free time as well. This site highlights my career and some of these hobby coding projects.

I have another site for my personal life with my wife, pets, family and friends. It's at topherchelle.com. It makes for a nice place to host my photo album software, which you'll read about here.

What's new?

2019-11 - I moved all my web sites to the cloud and turned off my home server. This involved refactoring the Photo Album to leverage BackBlaze B2 and AWS Lambda, along with AWS S3 for static web hosting.

Career

For the real detail, please view my resumé.

Synopsis: Computer Science bachelors from UCLA and masters from USC. I started my career at Xerox working on software for high-end printers. In 1998 I got excited by what was going on with the internet, so I left the big-company doldrums behind and moved to Silicon Valley to join a dot com startup. I've spent time at four startups since then. Every one led to an acquisition, but never a home run.

The most recent, Aplia, continues to this day as a division of Cengage Learning. Founded by Nobel Laureate Paul Romer, Aplia's online courseware helps instructors teach and students learn, and has been a huge success. My pride and passion for this application has kept me there building upon it since 2005. In this role, I transitioned my software developer career into management and have been leading the engineering team in various capacities for most of my time there.

Specialties: Web applications based in Java, SQL, Javascript. Agile software team management.

Personal Projects

Blogs

I used to blog about my experiences as an engineering manager and also about my hobby as an amateur poker player.