About me
I’m Christopher Bowns. I’m a senior at Virginia Tech, graduating in May 2008 with a dual degree in Computer Science and Economics, and a double minor in Mathematics and Statistics.
I work for Apple as a Applications Build Engineer. The cross-country move to start my dream job has been quite the adventure, and I’m happy to be in the Bay Area.
This past summer, I worked at Protiviti, an internal audit and business and technology consulting firm, as a technology consultant intern.
During the school year, I work at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute as a web programmer. Here’s the site we launched over the summer: PATRIC.
Here’s my résumé and my school transcript.
What do I enjoy?
Lately, I’ve been learning Objective-C and Cocoa on Mac OS X. Aaron Hillegass’s book, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, has been a great introduction to the language and the frameworks. The end of chapter challenges have been especially useful: I’ve been trying to create a few small applications for OS X to hone my Cocoa programming skills with, and the chapter challenges given me the initial jolt of inspiration that I needed.
Much of my initial difficulty with Cocoa and Objective-C stemmed from a lack of comfort with the language. Working through Stephen Kochan’s Programming in Objective-C has taken me to the level of language enlightenment that I knew so well from Java, C, and C++.
I had the opportunity (and the money) to attend the C4[1] conference in Chicago. It was a fantastic experience, all the way from the presentations, to the pizza, to meeting fellow developers and Mac consultants. The passion and drive I walked away (or flew back) with was invaluable, and carried over into the school year: I wrote CPU History during my winter break and spring semester.
What part of computer science do I like the most?
Of all the computer science topics covered at Tech in the past three years, software design and development are two of my favorite. Web design and programming, though no formal undergraduate classes teach it, have become one of my more knowledgeable areas over the past year and a half through a series of part-time and full-time jobs. Data structures and operating systems were two courses that were simultaneously painful and enlightening to take.
Was this painfully boring to read? You probably want my personal “About me” page instead.