First off, resumes are boring and stories are fun. Motion to skip the resume abstained.
This is the story of Chris Sherman. Sit back and enjoy the ride.
Chris was born February 20, 1986 to a loving Mother and Father. Born and raised in Canfield, Ohio, a small farm town outside of Youngstown, Ohio. (Youngstown, I know right?)
At the age of two, Chris' father introduced him to computers.
From this point on he was constantly 'banging' on a keyboard. Jump ahead to Chris' teenage years and his free time was constantly occupied by computer related activities. The 90's were the internet's infancy. Geocities was the Facebook, broadband internet was a luxury, Napster was tormenting the record industry, everyone 'got mail'.
During this time Chris had dreams and aspirations, what child didn't?
His were to spend his life doing what he loves, exactly what he was doing. He wanted to continue down this path and create a virtual legacy. Countless hours were spent surfing the virtual world and he could never have imagined where he would be a decade or so later.
Ohio State Buckeyes and Computer Science Engineering
In 2010 Chris completed his B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from The Ohio State University. During undergraduate studies, he spent more time than most would fathom in front of a terminal, a code monkey he called himself. He was never satisfied with code, constantly making strides to improve and learn from his past experiences. The internet set the table, Chris was hungry and boy did he eat. The internet set the table with a plethora of resources and information; Chris was hungry and eat he did.
In Chris' last 2 years of studies he managed to keep up with CSE courses, remained teaching assistant for CSE 560, and additionally played the role of a software developer and system administrator for Ohio State's Office of Chief Information Officer.
Chris implemented many projects during his undergraduate: Scheme recursive descent parser in Java, a TCP implementation using the UDP protocol in C among many others.
Caraeer Meat and Potatoes
OCIO SKMS Administrator (current)
Currently, Chris works for the OCIO office at Ohio State. In his current job he supports a Service-now instance service the entire university body for IT related issues. His office adopted SN late 2009, he was hired early 2010. During his current stint he has overseen Incident management implementation and revision, a first Change management implementation along with partaking in the process design, Problem management is slated to roll out any week, Business Service management has been implemented, Configuration Management is in its infancy, and Request Catalog is being populated with items as fast as they can be configured and validated.
His most notable project is the OCIO Self Service portal which is a PHP application integrating into Service-Now via web services. The rationale for this was to provide a fully ADA compliant customer facing portal for self service activities. This application was Chris' first project launched in June 2010 and we are currently shifting self service back into Service-Now's content management.
Along with support for this application suite, he manages and develops against some legacy projects he created during his student employment. He has received recognition in his office in various capacities and during his student employment was nominated for Ohio State Student Employee of the Year for 2009.
OCIO Student Developer and System Administrator (2 years)
As a student employee his primary duties were taking business necessities from inception to conception using technological solutions. Chris developed a 'Planned Outage' application. Looking back, he claims this is an extremely immature Change Management application which using Service-now he could have implemented in a matter of an hour. Coding from the ground up on a MySQL database and PHP code base. He is slightly saddened by his projects irrelevance when considering Service-now's abilities. Another project Chris spent time on was the OCIO Organizational Chart. This is a Javascript based front end utilizing Javascript InfoVis ToolKit which is supplied data by server side PHP and MySQL database.
CSE 560 Teaching Assistant (2 years)
This is a course focusing on implementation and documentation of an assembler, compiler,linker/loader and simulator for a pseudo language designed by the courses professor, Alvin Stutz. Chris was responsible for assuring functionality of students projects and validating documentation against specifications and code bases.
Let's wrap up the fun!
'Sometimes I look back on where I came from, sometimes I recall those coffee filled evenings struggling to wrangle a piece of code into something usable, sometimes I glance at my degree... I cannot believe I have come this far' he reminisces but knows he is not even close to finished!
Present day and Christopher plays the role of SKMS Administrator for the Office of the Chief Information Officer at The Ohio State University. Go Bucks!
The End
Much better than a resume don't you agree?
For those interesting in contacted me, email to chris.t.sherman [at] gmail [dot] com or feel free to call directly at 614-594-9602.
Linus working hard on Service-Now
