My name is Chris Sullins. I am a front-end engineer and UI designer with a love of good interfaces — for users and developers. I work for a small startup called Usermind.
I can also be found on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Beyond my deep interest in software development and UX design, I pursue many other subjects. I am an enthusiastic writer, an experienced amateur photographer, and an energetic ultimate frisbee player. Architecture and urban planning fascinate me. I read constantly.
My personal philosophy: “You cannot live unthinking.” In pursuit of this I question my own assumptions and I surround myself with other thinkers who will challenge me. I strongly believe that, no matter how messed up the world might seem, we have the power to improve it.
I've been at Usermind for well over a year. In that time I've learned Ember.js, built an expression parser with autocomplete, worked with more AWS services than I knew existed, and standardized our OAuth flows.
Two weeks ago I started work at Amazon Web Services. AWS is Amazon's cloud computing platform, which provides processing power to individuals and organizations that don't want to maintain their own server fleets. I'll be working on Amazon Silk, which is the browser for the Kindle Fire, Amazon's tablet device.
I've been puzzling over how best to display photos from Flickr. On my home page, I show my most recent six photos, which helps keep things fresh for search engines and visitors. The problem is that I generally only upload a photoset every month or two, so the same six photos remain up for a couple months, before switching out for a new set of six photos. Furthermore, those final six photos are probably related to each other, so they won't generally represent the variety contained in the photostream. Here are the possibilities I'm considering.
Sarah and I drink a lot of roasted oolong tea, and we're starting to think we should find a yixing clay teapot to devote to the category. Tea wisdom suggests that brewing the same kind of tea in a clay pot time after time will help bring out aspects of the tea that you don't get brewing in a gaiwan (our preferred method at home). These pots are an investment: they are expensive, and need to be seasoned — a well-used pot is far better than a new pot. Some yixing pots are generations old. Some are Chinese national treasures.
Today and yesterday I tackled my Gmail inbox: at least 6000 messages from the past eight years.
This year, instead of buying each other Christmas presents, Sarah and I decided to plan a trip to Vancouver. We found a Groupon for a nice hotel, and bought round-trip train tickets, and the night before leaving, we packed….
Recent tweets, books and links.
The Art of Fiction
Growing Up Weightless by John M. Ford
The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace
Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman
Ventus by Karl Schroeder
[hat with a wide brim] [dog] http://t.co/OzafeSUGti http://t.co/Iep3R2hAdv
RT @HenryR: What distributed systems theory should a distributed systems engineer know? A new blog post: http://t.co/f4uFjo9t12
Lightning about a second away from our house set off car alarms. Deafening thunder and a cloudburst.