About me

This site is mainly intended as a way to keep in touch with friends and family in Canada and elsewhere while I’m off wandering the world from one country to the next.

I’m a software developer who’s been fascinated by computers since I was a kid. I wrote my first lines of BASIC and 6502 assembly on a Canadian knock-off Apple II+ clone made by Apco, dutifully copying source listings line-by-line from Compute! magazine. Working my way up through a Laser Turbo XT and a 286, I finally landed on a 386 DX clocking in at a whopping 33 MHz. It was on this machine that I first installed Linux from a stack of 3.5" floppies and learned to code in Pascal and C. A couple years later, sometime in the mid-90s, some classmates convinced me I should check out FreeBSD, and because I’m used to it, but also out of sheer laziness, I’ve been using it as my main home setup pretty much ever since.

I headed off to university sometime in the early 90s. Seven years later, after wandering aimlessly from faculty to faculty through Chemistry, Physics & Astronomy, Japanese, and Electrical and Computer engineering programmes, I decided enough was enough, grabbed my B.Eng., and booted myself out the door and into the world.

Initially, I moved south of the border to spend a couple years in California working on AutoCAD at Autodesk. Deciding that this wasn’t south-of-the-border enough, I packed my bags and headed to Mérida, México, which sits neatly within the borders of the Chicxulub crater where the asteroid that caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event landed. I spent the year writing point-of-sale software for a local art gallery, doing some travelling, and doing some teaching on the side.

A year later, as my visa neared its end, I started wandering my way back to Canada via Cuba, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras before remembering which way was north and zig-zagging my way slowly back home on third-class buses.

A couple years later, after some more hacking on 3D CAD software, I picked up my few possessions and moved to Tokyo, Japan, where I met my wife, learned to speak, read, and write Japanese, got married, and had kids. I’ve had the pleasure of working on a variety of projects ranging from 3D CAD software, to equities trading systems, to the Dart programming language, the Flutter SDK, and the Fuchsia operating system. I currently work on open source projects at Google.

You can drop me a line anytime at chris@bracken.jp. (en, fr, ja)

About this site

This site contains no tracking, no cookies, and no JavaScript. It should work well with screen-readers and text-mode browsers. My web skills are near-nonexistent, so if you’ve got feedback on how it could be improved, shoot me an email.

You can find the source and instructions on how to build the site here.

PGP public key

If you’re a fan of crypto, you can find my public key below, or download it. I’ve also posted proof of ownership of this site.

GPG fingerprint: 9EF6 957A F673 652E 4AB5 542D BBE4 5868 CBE8 A8FE