Who am I?

Hey there! That last section told you a little about me, but my name is Chris Ward. More typically known online as “Chris Chinchilla,” as my real name is so common in English that no one would ever find me. At the time of writing, I live in Berlin. However, I was born in London and spent a long time in Melbourne. I have a degree in Multimedia Computer Science. After completing my studies, I played in bands for a few years before settling into the classic programmer job of the early 2000s, building websites for early e-commerce businesses. I built many of these sites in Drupal, which exposed me to open source software. Drupal was quite ahead of its time in many ways, especially when it came to the community. I enjoy programming, but I realized relatively quickly in my career that I don’t quite have the mindset to be an excellent programmer. At Drupal community events, there were often activities for people who don’t code, and I started contributing by summarizing issue discussions and writing documentation. I was much better at this and had never realized it was a job people would pay you to do! Over the years after that, I moved in and out of technology ecosystems and between roles in tech writing and editing, tech blogging, developer relations, and more. Also, typically, I have a couple of side projects along the way.