Thanks for visiting my professional portfolio and online resume.

I’m Chris Larsen, a full-stack web application architect and engineer with over 20 years of experience. I thoroughly enjoy getting my hands dirty with data-rich applications. I work well both autonomously, and in groups where I enjoy mentoring junior developers and finding solutions to challenging business or technical problems.

I specialize in LAMP stack development and open source, however, I am familiar with and have practical experience with several other server-side languages including Coldfusion, C#, and Visual Basic.

Being a full-stack engineer and architect, I’ve built solutions from concept to production, including database design, deployment, configuration, back-end logic, and presentation layer.

Proprietary Experience

ClearTerms.com is a B2B credit risk analysis tool for use in evaluating new customers, or re-evaluating existing customers with clear and accurate, and up-to-the-minute trade reference data.

The application automates the arduous task of obtaining a customer’s credit application and processing trade reference requests. The entire process is done online, so there are no illegible forms and faxes to transpose. The service gathers all of the data and presents it to the customer in a summary view with expandable sections to help make the most use of the data.

I used best practices to implement a smooth and intuitive user interface. For example, instead of sending email messages at user runtime, I queue the message and clear the queue using cron so there’s no chance the user will ever experience lag due to a temporarily unresponsive AWS email server. I also built a system to track bounced email messages so users can be notified, and applications marked for manual intervention.

I was contracted to build a “Field Management System” which allows project managers to access Quickbooks data from the field. This system automates a lot of processes for the landscape company I wrote it for and reduces order errors, notably, out-of-stock exceptions. I have plans to refactor this application into a work-order system for skilled professionals like auto-mechanics, plumbers, electricians, and even dentists.

I consulted for a company that is building a .Net application for managing DoD contracts. I performed a deep-dive analysis of the application and provided the development team with guidance and mentoring. I wrote extensive reviews of the code and architecture which brought to light some serious technical debt. I ended up building workarounds using a completely different technology stack to access the data, in conjunction with a more effective UI and UX for processing multiple pages of line item data. This not only prevented a major embarrassment to the company in front of investors and DoD stakeholders, but it also garnered even more interest and praise from stakeholders.

In my spare time, I developed two completely separate applications, the first being a project package manager similar to the one being developed by the client company, the other is a project data interchange utility that converts various data sources (SQL, Excel, CSV, etc.) to PD2 standard project data interchange format by use of a comprehensive mapping tool. You can click on each of the links to see screenshots, and to access links to the demos – along with credentials.

Professional Experience

Avoya Travel: Built a custom CMS for a very successful (pre-pandemic) cruise company using the WIMC stack (Windows, IIS, MS-SQL, and Coldfusion.)

The company has multiple, weekly cruise itineraries for which they’ve negotiated exclusive deals with the cruise lines. At the time, social media posts were made for each new itinerary – and the system I built pulls all of these posts and images from each of the four major social media platforms, stores them in a centralized table, which provides a means of consuming all the content from one source. The application used was a smorgasbord of posts on the front end from the four platforms on the blog page.

It appears today that they have reversed this process in accordance with my suggestions, whereby the posts are created on the CMS and then posted to the social media platforms as new posts through an automated process.

The CMS also built dynamic landing pages using various predefined route maps highlighting the ports of call, images of the ports of calls and the destination, discounts, all-inclusive package details, the ship, the ship’s complement, etc… to illustrate the route each itinerary takes and the amenities offered.

Built calls to action forms, including the exit pop-up, which proved cumbersome since the browsers all implemented ways to prevent pop-ups. I also built out Facebook calls to action which generated targeted leads specific to a given itinerary.

Conversion of complete ERP systems from basic data like customer/vendor, product, and inventory to complex data including general ledger and sub-ledger migration with a special emphasis on making the process completely seamless to end-users. No variances in reporting and on-screen data in various views and forms tolerated, nor are adjusting entries to “fudge” balances, regardless of size. The first time I did this was at Transworld Media – when they converted their ERP from Platinum to Sage Business Works after it was bought by AOL and subsequently by Time Warner. The second time I did this was for ISI Pharmaceuticals in Carlsbad, CA – where they converted their ERP from Platinum to Great Plains. The last time was for an online pay-for-view and Digital Rights Management service called Entriq, inc. – also out of Carlsbad, CA, who converted to Microsoft Great Plains from Peachtree. Each migration had its own unique set of challenges and nuances because of the different types of businesses.

Invitrogen, Inc./BioReliance, Inc.: I was initially hired as the accounts receivable integrations specialist where I coordinated the submission of billings via EDI, I processed and troubleshot A/R transactions, posted and reconciled cash receipts across multiple operating and business units – including intracompany billings, I completed month-end accounting functions (journal entries, dunning letters, etc..) and developed solutions for tracking unapplied cash receipts, which became a serious problem during the integration of financial functions into Invitrogen’s ERP. I deployed and managed the credit card processing system, including training of peers. I participated in making ready systems for the integration of emailed PDF invoices in an Oracle financials environment. Worked with stakeholders and program/project managers to develop scripts that process complex progress billings for assays performed for third-party biotech and pharma clients by a major biotech company in Carlsbad. Assisted with the integration of financial processes from an acquired company into Invitrogen’s core ERP system. Invitrogen is now a part of Thermo Fisher Scientific.

ResumeRabbit.com: I was the web operations engineer during the website’s most prolific growth. The service distributes customers’ resumes to various job boards based on the service selected. It was my job to configure new job-board websites that accepted resumes to accept resumes by using various technologies by gathering intelligence by reverse engineering resume posting processes. This also involved intensive manual data mapping at first, until an auto-mapping utility was introduced, which pulled HTML, parsed all the HTML form elements and inputs, and attempted to match local values to the job board’s fields. For example, the auto-mapper would detect a “FT”, or “Full Time” or “canned” variants thereof; within the value property of options defined in a given input on the external form field and map to the corresponding internal data source.

It was my job to also monitor the resume “Posting Health Report” which would designate when errors occurred while attempting to post data to third-party websites. It was somewhat of a clandestine operation, the software was designed to act as if the user was actually posting the resume – so API’s were never requested from new postable job-boards.

It was a very exciting, and challenging role, I enjoyed my time working with such immense amounts of data, and this experience set the tone for my future projects.

Transworld Media: I was the accounts receivable manager. During my time at Transworld, I formally trained for software engineering, after which, I built custom software solutions for various departments. In accounting, the new credit card processing software mandated by Time Inc. post-acquisition did not have the functionality to print receipts – ridiculous as it sounds – so I wrote a VB application that batch-processed the transaction data directly from the software’s data file, on a daily basis.

For Transworld Surf Business magazine (a surf industry trade publication) I built a solution that calculates an equal place ranking of professional surfers and their various sponsored goods, based on how many times they appear in each of the three consumer Surf magazines in print at the time. The name of the resulting table was called the “Exposure-O-Meter” and was published in all subsequent volumes of the printed trade journal.

HMI Pharmaceuticals: In my very first role out of high school – my job was to manually type out HICFA forms (Health Insurance Claim Form) from data on a screen, I realized that the data could easily be extracted into a file and exported in any manner I chose. It was my very first success in software engineering in a production environment- and I saved countless hours of tedious work and verification, and eliminated the chance for errors since the data came directly from the source. HMI Pharmaceuticals is a mail-order pharmacy out of Buffalo Grove, IL.