Hey, I’m Chris

Written April 18, 2026

I’ve spent the last few years in Silicon Valley working as a software engineer in Big Tech. I’ve come to the realization that the path I’m on of playing the Tech game just isn’t in the cards for me. Nor do I think it’s starting some buzzy tech startup either. So lately I’ve been embarking on a journey of exploration trying to find the path that a) I can apply and leverage my particular skills and experience toward, and b) offers some undiscovered or unexploited opportunity.

The main quest

The most promising direction that fits this bill is taking the tools and skills I’ve been building in tech, especially around leveraging the latest agentic coding tools, and bringing it outside the Silicon Valley bubble. Deploying them into other fields is a very underexplored area. Few people at my level of fluency with these AI tools are doing it, or even seem willing to. They’re too comfortable staying inside Silicon Valley.

Very recently I’ve been trying to do just this with UC Santa Barbara’s Economics department, where I received my undergrad degree. I gave a talk a few days ago to faculty and grad students in the econ department introducing agentic coding tools, covering what they are and what faculty and grad students can do with them for research and teaching. Rather than use slides, I built the presentation as a website. You can find it at ucsb-econ-agents-workshop.com. Unfortunately the talk itself wasn’t recorded, so I re-recorded it afterwards. You can watch it on YouTube . Here are some pictures from the day:

It got a lot of positive feedback, and deeper hands-on workshops for faculty and grad students are in the works.

I’ve also started working with the UCSB Economic Forecast Project. EFP is a research project housed under the econ department. I was an RA there as an undergrad. A lot of our pipelines back then lived in messy R scripts or were done manually in Excel. I’ve been using coding agents to streamline and overhaul them, automating a lot of the data collection and cleaning, and I’m also overhauling the book website where we present our charts and findings, with sleeker charts and a more maintainable stack. EFP holds a big summit at the end of May with local business leaders and elected officials, and this work will be shared there. I’ll share more here as we get closer.

The conclusion of all this is uncertain, but all the right ingredients are there for it to be exciting, impactful, and boundary-pushing. I really hope it works out; the longer I’ve strayed away from the straight and narrow career path, the more I desire not to go back.

Side quests

On the side I also run 626 Software, a small agency serving local small business owners.