About me

My name is Christian Rich, I've been building things with code since I was 12 years old. I sort of fell into it by coincidence. But let me tell you how it all started.

The backstory

It was Christmas, sometime back in the late 80ies, and my Dad had gotten me a Commodore 64.

A nondescript elongated piece of latte-coloured plastic with dark brown keys. We nick-named it "The Breadbox".

My mates and I played the games - especially "Bruce Lee" was popular. It was fresh and fun, and nothing we had ever seen before. But I kept wondering about that pesky "LOAD" command you had to type to start the game:

If it can "LOAD" what else can it do..?

I cracked open the manual and started learning BASIC. After a few month of learning and experimenting, I hit a hard performance wall: The sprites in my game "Ninja Shadow Warrior" were moving very, very, slowly. Like watching grass grow... 🤔

So it turns out, that games I had been playing with my mates were ALL written in something called "Native Assembly language" aka Machine Language aka Machine Code.

I acquired the recommended books, and wrapping my head around machine architecture, instruction sets, memory allocation and things of that nature.

Eventually I was able to produce demos akin of these (on the Amiga 500 which I acquired the year after):

At the peak of my youth developer career, I spent a great deal of 1.44 Mb floppy disks

From Discovery To Gloom & Doom

I'm still amazed how far we have come, as a human race. In my lifetime I have seen more incredible scientific break-throughs and jaw dropping moments than any human before me - since the last ice age 10,000 years ago.

The pace is incredible, and I'm concerned with A.I and the A.I Singularity being too disruptive. Too much, and too soon - especially in the hands of criminal syndicates and rogue nation states. Maybe WW3 will become "The Great Battle of The A.Is"?

Serverless technology

When I'm not concerned with A.I killer robots taking over the world, I think about how I can keep organisations and businesses safe from hackers and avoid nation-wide and super awkward data leaks turning all of us into potential victims of identity theft.

These are one of my main drivers for advocating Serverless technology on the AWS platform. When designed and implemented by qualified Serverless teams, you are building your business on a secure foundation.

With Serverless technology you can spin up complex, secure and high performing applications in the cloud while managing cost and writing a minimum of code.

Some thoughts about software:
- I prefer building small agnostic and event-driven building blocks over monolithic implementations
- I prefer writing less code and use more infrastructure in the cloud

Why this blog

I've always researched and prototyped with code and like to discuss and share ideas. Reading blogs is pretty much how I keep myself up-to-date, and when I crack difficult problems or find great solutions I feel like sharing is the better way to go.

Public events, getting together IRL

I'm keen to participate and contribute to the worldwide community of software engineers. I'm here to spread the word about Serverless computing and happy to participate and speak at public events, developer forums, hack-a-thons etc.

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