About Chris
Chris Allison is a self-taught computer geek with a passion for all things technical. As a child he began programming BASIC on a TRS-80 Model 1 and he has been hooked on computers ever since. He moved on to other programming languages, collecting them as others collect stamps; BASIC, C, C++, Pascal, Visual BASIC, and more recently HTML with CSS, Javascript, and PHP.
Following his father's advice ("If you love doing something, don't do it for a living"), Chris pursued a career in computer infrastructure instead of programming. Since no college major addressed the area of computer networking at the time, he learned on his own and on the job. He built his first network in 1992 (LANtastic) while working as a clerk at a law firm. Later, Chris trained as a Certified Novell Engineer (CNE) and began consulting for the first time.
He added system administration to his list of skills, eventually working with a great variety of operating systems including all versions of Microsoft Windows, SCO Unix, Solaris, and various distributions of Linux. Along the way he worked with many types of middleware and server software like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and VMWare among others.
Where is a jack-of-all-trades computer geek to go next? Security, of course! With a professional background in all phases of infrastructure and a personal background in programming, Chris is ideally suited to security. The ability to speak and relate to system administrators, network engineers, database administrators, and programmers on their own terms makes him able to bring these groups together to execute secure designs.
