At Sierra, custom software development is one of our core services. Our software engineering team loves a challenge, so they’re usually handling complex projects. We’re proud of the team, and this month in our Employee Spotlight, we’d like to honor Chris Chappel, Senior Application Engineer at Sierra w/o Wires.
Before he joined the Sierra team, Chris studied computer programming at the Pittsburgh Technical Institute (PTI), and interned with the U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of Surface Mining. In his spare time, Chris travels often. He notes that this year he’s considering going to Orlando, Florida, to play a game called Ingress. It’s a GPS based mobile game that centers around travelling and capturing portals across the world.
Chris has been with Sierra for over 5 years, and he specializes in ASP.NET, VB.NET, C#.NET, SQL, and Javascript. He enjoys learning new things, and says that one of the most rewarding experiences an application engineer can have is to learn a new programming language. He recounts an experience he’s had:
If there’s one really good way to learn a new language in practice, it’s by debugging. I can recall a project involving debugging an application that was written in Ruby. I didn’t have any experience with Ruby, but I love learning something new, so I offered to work on the project. It was a challenge, but worthwhile. By the time the project was complete, I felt really comfortable working with the language.
In his day-to-day work, Chris spends a lot of his time improving Sierra’s application based offerings, like Sierra Billing Manager and Sierra Incident Manager, along with meeting onsite with customers to discuss their needs. He says it’s fulfilling work, because what he does will directly affect the efficiency and convenience of customers. He mentions that because of the work he’s done with Sierra Billing Manager alone, he knows of companies that have saved enough money to hire new employees to grow their business.
If you’re considering custom software, or any of Sierra’s software, Chris is the guy to talk to, and we can’t think of anyone who’s more qualified.
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Sierra w/o Wires, Inc. is an IT Managed Service and Support provider, specializing in remote monitoring and remote management of computing systems, cloud/virtual systems hosting, VoIP/SIP PBX trunks and solutions, physical server hosting, software development and hardware and software reselling.
