About Me

I'm Chris! 

When I was 12, I learned to code basic games in Microsoft Visual Basic; the language was an awful choice and I'm sure I was terrible at it, but it changed the way I saw the world. A programming language was a tool for modelling anything and, like all kids, I was trying to figure out the world around me. Throughout my teens, I found myself applying the logic, organization, and linguistic clarity of programming to understand math, physics, economics, writing, politics, and beyond. It was universally applicable. 

I studied math and philosophy in university, but every time I couldn't figure something out, I'd try to program it until the compiler forced me to understand even the most complex or nuanced topics: complex numbers, high dimensional topology, quantum mechanics, free will, ethics. I worked at an actuarial consulting firm -- the exams were easier for me to study for than others because I could break down the topics into codeable chunks to demystify them; huge Excel models were no worse than the complex programs I had written; reasoning about large datasets was old-hat by then.

I travelled the world and taught myself new languages, C#, Python, and Rust. Once you've learned one language, learning the next is far easier.  

I worked at a software company deploying and improving our platform at Fortune 100 customers (insurance, airlines, consumer packaged goods) -- learning each new industry was just another application of mental models that I'd been constructing for years.

Now, I'm a dad and I get to watch my son start to construct his own mental models of the world around him. I can't wait until he's old enough to learn to code, but until then, I'm teaching as many people my Coding Mental Models approach as I can.

Reach out via codingmentalmodels@gmail.com if you're interested in any of the subjects I teach (below), and come watch on Twitch or check out my Youtube if you want to see the sorts of things I work on or just chat.