Christian (Chris) Yates

Interactive strategy, management, architecture and development.

Contact

cell: 843.298.2579 | mail: chris@christianyates.com | LinkedIn profile

Experience & Expertise

• Business
  • 12+ years in leadership roles in interactive/online media.
  • 11+ years as a manager and mentor of diverse teams of direct reports, matrixed groups and vendors.
  • Responsibility for P&L, short and long term budget planning.
  • Manager of product and project development on multiple scales. Comfortable in a deadline-driven environment with multiple simultaneous projects.
  • Leader of agile, entrepreneurial groups.
• Technology
  • Hands-on software development expertise in a variety of languages including, PHP, Perl, Python, Javascript and Actionscript.
  • Experienced with frameworks and content management systems including Drupal, jQuery, Flex, Mate.
  • Expertise in full-stack application/site architecture.
  • Extensive experience integrating content management systems and legacy/proprietary applications.
  • Voracious consumer of developing technology, with the ability to learn and adapt quickly.
  • Experience choosing the right technology to solve business problems.

Employment History

• Senior Director, Solutions Architecture

  Acquia
  September 2011 - present

• Senior Manager, Presales Consulting

  Acquia
  April 2011 - September 2011
  • Building a global presales solutions consulting team.

• Senior Architect and Enterprise Evangelist

  Acquia
  May 2010 - April 2011
  • Architected successful proposals to U.S. federal government for multi-million-dollar Drupal services contracts.
  • Manage interface between business development, sales, engineering, marketing and professional services divisions.
  • Manage strategic planning for government certification and accreditation (C&A).
  • Manage technical discovery process, vendor integration during business development process.
  • Promote Drupal and Acquia professional services to enterprise and government customers.
  • Assist enterprise sales team with technical knowledge of Drupal.
  • Assist customer engineering resources with determining best fit Drupal solutions for their organizations.
  • Develop prototype workflows and sites.

• Web Architect & Scientific Software Engineer

  Mars Space Flight Facility, Arizona State University

  Note: Mars Space Flight designed and operates the THEMIS camera aboard the Mars Odyssey spacecraft and the MiniTES instruments aboard the two Mars Exploration Rovers for NASA.

  May 2008 - May 2010
  • Developed scalable architecture supporting web applications on Drupal and other platforms, including tools for software maintenance and deployment to multiple web front-end servers.
  • Created a multitude of Drupal modules for tasks including:
    • Generation of zoomable image user interfaces through custom CCK fields/widgets.
    • Integration with legacy authentication systems and automated user migration for Single-Signon.
    • Integration with Java web services. See Mars Image Explorer.
    • Integration with Java fat clients (JMARS).
  • Developed Flex widgets and full RIA's for scientific data visualization and analysis.
  • Created back-end services in support of scientific and education/outreach applications in Python, Perl and PHP.
  • Architected distance learning framework for multiple age group educational program.
  • Direct and mentor staff on interactive design, development and marketing best practices.

  Technologies: Flex, ActionScript, Perl, Python, Lighttpd, HTML::Mason, PHP (4.x, 5.x) , LAMP, Drupal

• Vice President, Interactive Media

  Lowcountry Newspapers, division of The McClatchy Company (NYSE:MNI)
  Mar 2007-May 2008
  • Led interactive product development and project management for two daily newspaper web sites and multiple vertical market community sites.
  • Acted as internal consultant for business units as they integrated core operations more deeply with interactive.
  • Developed content, advertising and marketing strategies in cooperation with other departments.
  • Mentored and managed matrixed teams with on-site and remote constituents.
  • Supervised web site design, usability and standards.
  • Architected public-facing and intranet applications.
  • Developed UX for high-volume public facing news sites.
  • Architected frameworks for rapid development of vertical-market web sites.
  • Developed web applications in multiple languages.

  Technologies: PHP, Perl, LAMP/SAMP, Sybase, MySQL, Drupal, Javascript, AJAX, analytics, SEO

• Director, Interactive and Information Technology

  Lowcountry Newspapers
  2002-2007
  • Architected interactive features and products.
  • Planned technology projects, dealing with vendors, partners and department leaders.
  • Managed operational and capital budgets, one and five year plans.
  • Spearhead community publishing and multimedia initiatives online.
  • Drove audience growth 30+% in three month span through SEO technology revamp and content best practices mentoring.
  • Developed interactive applications on open-source frameworks and content management systems for internal and public use.
  • Planned and implemented installation of integrated advertising and accounting management system. Supervised multi-departmental implementation team, coordinated project workflow and managed project from RFP and vendor selection to final testing and go-live.
  • Implemented VMware, blade server and SAN infrastructure for support of multiple applications and operating systems.
  • Planned and implemented technology integrations for new state-of-the-art newspaper production facility, including prepress, networking, VOIP systems.
  • Develop integrations between legacy systems and to Web-based front ends.
  • Supervised IT and Interactive staff.

  Technologies: Linux, Solaris (9/10), LAMP, Sybase ASE, MySQL, Perl/Mason, PHP, Drupal, Avaya VOIP, Extreme, Cisco IOS/PIX

• New Media Director

  Lowcountry Newspapers
  2000-2002
  • Developed islandpacket.com and beaufortgazette.com on Vignette and McClatchy Interactive Digital Workbench platforms, and grew site traffic from fewer than 500,000 to nearly 3 million monthly page views, 275,000+ monthly unique visitors.
  • Developed perl and php based web publishing tools for internal use.
  • Managed online advertising sales and production.
  • Responsible for all interactive P&L, budgeting, capital planning.
  • Directed design and development of all Internet products.

  Technologies: Perl/Mason, Tcl, PHP, HTML, CSS

• Web Site Manager

  The Island Packet
  1999-2000
  • Responsible for award-winning design of islandpacket.com newspaper Web site, mylowcountry.com regional portal.
  • Managed content development and flow, special projects development, programming in tcl and perl.

  Technologies: Perl, Tcl, HTML, CSS, Applescript

Education

Bachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineering, Clemson University, 1999

Projects of Potential Interest

• Currently developing an application for exploring, manipulating and analyzing infrared spectroscopy data in an interactive way. I am architecting and developing the full app stack including:
  • A Flex RIA using the Mate MVC framework, extensive custom Flex charting and data import/export capabilities.
  • A Python AMF and JSON web service backed by Postgresql and a Linux computational cluster.
  • Integrations with LDAP authentication via custom php web services.
  This project has not yet been released, but I would be happy to demonstrate privately.
• Suggest an Image, a project in cooperation with Google to showcase Google Earth 5.0, which allows the public to see where the Mars Odyssey spacecraft will be orbiting in the coming week, and suggest locations to image with the THEMIS camera.
  • >Architected and developed UX and CMS integrations with proprietary software and external databases.
  • Designed integrations between proprietary data services and Drupal CMS, including custom module development and theming.
  • Developed UI for suggesting imaging locations for Mars Odyssey spacecraft via Google Earth 5.0 Plugin and jQuery.
  • Worked with Google engineers on scalability best practices for Google-scale deployment of application.
  A Drupal-centric writeup with greater detail is available on the Suggest an Image site.
• Mars Image Explorer a unified viewer application for millions of Mars images from the Viking era (late 1970's) through present missions.
  • Integrated Drupal CMS, jQuery, J2EE RESTful data services, Flex and Actionscript Remoting.
  • Developed custom Drupal modules for user management, proprietary authentication system integrations, and Java service integration.
  • Developed Python web service for image manipulation and dynamic image tile generation for Deep Zoom style image interfaces.
  • Developed Flex widgets.
    • Flex/REST/AMF integration.
    • Flex/jQuery/Python integration.

Open Source

• Hosting Diagnostics: A Drupal module providing stats pertinent to hosting companies (like Acquia) from a Drupal installation.
• Key Redirect: A Drupal module providing a url redirection service with authentication for external applications - i.e. Java, Flash, etc.
• Public Preview: A Drupal module allowing selective access to "unpublished" pages via a special URL, i.e. for pre-release to the press or others before general release.
• Commentify: A Drupal module for integrating Drupal as a commenting engine in other content management systems.
• columnizeList: A jQuery plugin that unobtrusively turns an HTML list into even-height columns.
• Semantic Tabs: A jQuery plugin that generates a tabbed interface from semantic HTML markup.
• Column View: A jQuery plugin that generates a Mac OS X Finder style UI widget from a hierarchical HTML list.