About Chuck
I've always enjoyed figuring out how things work and then finding ways to make them work better.
That curiosity began when my father brought home an Apple IIe with a monochrome monitor and a noisy dot-matrix printer. Like many kids of that era, I quickly discovered that computers were much more interesting when you could make them do something they weren't doing before. I learned Apple BASIC, experimented with Logo, created simple animations in Brøderbund Fantavision, and spent countless hours playing (and occasionally reverse engineering) classics like King's Quest, Karateka, Montezuma's Revenge, and Project: Space Station. I even typed an entire version of Snake from a BYTE magazine just to see if I could make it work.
Years later I bought my first Macintosh, a rather unusual Quadra 610 DOS Compatible. Only about 25,000 were ever produced, and it contained both a Motorola processor for Mac OS and an Intel 486 processor for DOS and Windows. Owning such an odd hybrid machine forced me to learn the kinds of obscure technical details that most people never encountered, including how to recover from memory allocation mistakes by resetting the Macintosh PRAM. At the time it just seemed like another problem to solve, but that obscure bit of knowledge unexpectedly shaped my career.
Fast-forward a bit and I interviewed with Sonnet Technology a company known for Macintosh upgrades and expansion hardware. During the interview, CEO Robert Farnsworth asked me a deceptively simple question: "How do you reset the PRAM?" I answered without hesitation. Later he told me I was the only candidate who knew the answer. That conversation earned me my first full-time job in the technology industry.
At Sonnet I worked in technical support, authored installation manuals and technical documentation, approved warranty exchanges, and eventually built the company's first website using Adobe PageMill. Looking back, it was an ideal place to learn because every day involved solving new problems for customers.
Building on that experience, I eventually took on a new role with 20th Century Fox as a Macintosh Field Technician before moving into a Systems Analyst role with Fox Filmed Entertainment. Working in the entertainment industry led to experiences I never could have predicted. I traded FileMaker Pro tips with Academy Award-winning producer Jon Landau, repaired Harold Ramis's PowerBook, and traveled to Toronto to help establish the production office for the original X-Men film.
Around that same time I began taking on freelance work, designing websites, building databases, editing video, and providing technical consulting for clients including The Jim Henson Company, Aubrey & Associates and Foote, Cone & Belding (now part of BBDO Chicago). Freelancing exposed me to a wide variety of technologies and taught me that every client brings a different puzzle to solve.
After moving to Pathway Capital Management, I shifted from desktop support into full-time software development. I learned PHP while rebuilding the company's private financial reporting platform and even found myself working in 4th Dimension, an uncommon Pascal-based database environment. Every project seemed to introduce another language, framework, or technology… and I enjoyed that challenge.
One of the most exciting chapters of my career began at AEG Live (now AEG Presents) I initially joined to rebuild the AEG Live corporate website, but that project grew into several years of developing websites and software for artists, venues, festivals, and eventually the launch of AXS, AEG's global ticketing platform.
One particularly memorable project was supporting the announcement of Michael Jackson's return to the stage at London's O2 Arena. On announcement day the site handled more than 6.2 million requests while many associated vendor sites struggled under the enormous traffic. Watching our systems continue to perform under that kind of pressure gave me an appreciation for scalability and reliability that still influences the way I build software today.
As AXS grew internationally, our team designed a custom content management system and API platform capable of supporting venues around the world in multiple languages. Beyond the technical challenges, what I remember most fondly was the incredible team of talented people I had the opportunity to work alongside.
In 2014 I joined Shock Media Group where I eventually became Manager of Information Technology. Working in a startup incubator meant wearing many hats: software developer, architect, project manager, mentor, and occasionally firefighter. It was an environment that rewarded adaptability and creative problem solving.
After moving to BroadBean Technology (part of Career Builder) I helped modernize legacy recruiting platforms using Angular and Node.js while working with an international engineering team. Shortly afterward I joined Parcel Pending, where I focused on API integrations, platform architecture, reporting, and improving data quality across multiple enterprise systems.
More recently my interests have naturally expanded beyond software development into cloud infrastructure, automation, and platform engineering. At Quadient I've had the opportunity to work extensively with AWS, Terraform, Ansible, Aurora MySQL, and infrastructure automation. I've helped improve production reliability, reduce cloud costs through FinOps initiatives, automate operational processes, and prevent outages before customers ever knew there was a problem. While the technologies have changed dramatically since the days of the Apple IIe, I still get the same satisfaction from solving difficult technical problems.
Of course, none of these experiences would mean nearly as much without my family. My wife Michelle and I have been married for more than three decades, and we're incredibly proud of our daughters, Taylor and Samantha. They've been part of every step of this journey, and they remain my greatest accomplishment.
