Kriss Strikis

Get to know Kriss Strikis

What are you looking for in your next role?

I'm still looking for my first role, but eventually I'd like to move into devops, maybe dev-sec-ops, and then cloud architecture. The aspects of my ideal first role would be a company with a culture that has experience testing out new technologies and of mentorship and learning from each other. Everyone has something to teach others–I hope to learn from people and their experiences. Technically, I love performance and efficiency, and hope there would be a chance for me to bring my education in engineering to that table.

Why did you decide to change career and/or educational paths? What was your prior path and how did you end up down that road initially?

It's been a long time coming. I always thought I'd end up in tech but kind of fell into different areas. After high school, I joined the USAF. After that, I got asked to help make beer. I felt that working in the brewery was very comfortable but not where I'd want to stay forever. I went to work on my Bachelor’s at UMass, and started back part time making beer (a brewery is a great place with a lot of different interesting problems to work on!) Then, after struggling with some real-life issues for a little while, I decided that a very good way to get back on track with my full-time tech career was to sign up for a boot camp. Glad I did!

Where have you been involved in the tech community (events attended, volunteer activities, etc.)?

The Air Force had a constant flow of volunteer opportunities which I participated in, though these were not so tech-oriented and I miss the constant chance to jump in with a group to work on some little random project. The moment I decided to get to UMass’ engineering department was when I volunteered at a UMass hackathon, where I spent a lot of time just meeting people and talking about their projects or companies. The volunteer work was pretty easy–walking into the makerspace and seeing the awesome environment is what I remember most. It would be amazing to be close to these kinds of clubs and events in the future.

What has been the most fulfilling aspect of your journey towards becoming a web developer? What's been your biggest challenge and how have you overcome it?

Seeing some questions I had about how developer processes work slowly become answered has been one of the most fulfilling aspects so far. I had started studying DevOps/AWS prior to Launch and ideas like CI/CD make much more sense having learned to use Jest and Cypress. My biggest technical challenge? There are just too many things to try to learn, really. Focusing on the curriculum at LA is how I've made progress.

If you had an unlimited budget and resources, what would you build?

I’d build a space station! Only half-kidding, as space exploration is an exciting concept for me. As for something more grounded in reality, I'd recreate [popular proprietary web service] with a decentralized, free/libre/open source alternative that does not rely on advertising money or dark patterns to survive! My first experiences building computers and tinkering with Linux (among other operating systems) were heavily influenced by the open source community and I hope to give back to it.