About Me

Introduction

Hi, my name is Chris Kugler, and I’m a software engineer based in Orange County, California. I’ve been writing software professionally for over 15 years for a variety of industries. When I was a small child, video games were something that got me interested in technology which in turn lead me to learning about programming and software development which I’ve turned into a successful career. I've written software for streaming entertainment, cellular network analysis, mortgage, and online gaming. While working in each of those industries I've done everything from front end software development, backend services, database design, cloud infrastructure, business analysis, and process improvement planning. Aside from my employed work I've independently worked on game development and dabbled in VR/AR technologies.

Employment History

I started my professional career in 2005 while I was still in college working on my BS. I joined Celare software, a startup based in Irvine, Ca that was working on the first 3D online poker game. This was during a time when online gambling was still legal and extremely profitable for the companies running such games. I wrote the desktop client software for the game using C++ and DirectX 9. Around the same time we were readying the launch of the real money version of the game to the public the online gambling laws took effect, and without an existing customer base the company went under.

It was at this point I took up working in the mortgage industry at LendingTree Loans. This was my first foray into C# and the .NET platform, both of which were easy enough to pick up and work with after doing C++ for years at that point. I spent about a year there, and left after the housing market crash in 2008 and the company was planning on entering a maintenance mode on its technology.

I worked at Comarco Wireless Test Solutions from 2008 – 2010 building software to analyze cellular call and data networks. The software I worked on there was used by Verizon and AT&T during a time they were competing heavily to have the best network, specifically for data usage since smart phones were rapidly increasing in popularity.

In 2010 an opportunity came to return to my previous employer, LendingTree Loans (which would later become Discover Home Loans), and work on rewriting the companies Loan Origination System (LOS) from the ground up using the latest Microsoft technologies of the time and with freedom from business requirements. We were encouraged to learn as much about the business and industry as we could and to spend a frequent amount of time learning about our users and understanding the problems they had and coming up with software solutions to make their lives easier. At the time this was a way of doing things I hadn’t come across. The idea of software developers designing and proposing how software should work is a natural way of doing things, yet in larger corporations the status quo is for people that don’t really understand how software works to determine the best software solution for the users and pass this design down in the form of business requirements. During the 5 years I spent there I learned a great deal about people and how they interact with the technology around them and helped build something great.

In 2014 I scaled back my involvement at Discover to a part time role before leaving completely in 2015 so that I could to put more time into learning game development, something I'd always been interested in. I experimented with Unity3D and released 2 mobile games. The first game I released was called Dungeoneer, a first person role playing game in the styling of classic might and magic and wizardry computer games from the 80's. The second game I made was an arcade shooter in the style of duck hunt called Quacker Blaster which utilized the gyroscope in smartphones to allow the player to aim and fire using their phones. I also spent a fair amount if time working with the Oculus VR Devkit and HTC Vive VR devices, but never released a product using the technology.

In 2017 I decided to rejoin the workforce and spent 4 years working at Twitch LLC. White at Twitch I drastically updated my skillset by building several .NET Core ASP.NET Docker services hosted in AWS infrastructure. I worked on public facing systems and infrastructure used in delivering the main Twitch.tv web property and desktop client applications to millions of daily users. I also worked on private internal services and infrastructure used in deploying and managing the web and desktop client software releases making it easy for developers to get their changes out in a fast, controlled, and reliable manor, as well as various error and performance tracking systems for monitoring the services I built and maintained. During that time I learned a lot about cloud architecture and migrated our legacy infrastructure to use AWS CDK to manage and deploy our infrastructure changes.

Today
I left Twitch in 2021 to take some time for R&R, work on my health, and focusing on my independent software projects. In that time I've refreshed my Unity3D skills and started working on some game projects I've had in the back of my head.

Contact

Email: ChrisKugler@outlook.com

You can also find links to most of my socials as well as more of what I'm up to via my linktree at https://linktr.ee/chriskugler