About Me

Hi, my name is Chris Board. I am a developer and founder (or at least trying to be) based in the UK near the south coast.

I have been coding for around 15+ years, learning to code when I was aged 11, which was a simple HTML/PHP website with MySQL database as a pocket money manager, and have been coding ever since.

I currently work full time as a Solution Architect/Support Manager for a local telecoms software company, helping to design and implement solutions for some large UK telecoms companies and providing and managing the support for these solutions.

In my spare time, I've developed a couple of side projects, some just to help me learn something new, some to try and productise and sell. The development is the easy(ish) part, the marketing on the other hand, not so much, (I think every developer says that).

Some of the smaller projects are little libraries that interact with other services that didn't exist, such as a C++ library to send metrics to Datadog via StatsD, or a C++ library to connect to Redis.

A bigger library, is my Android MySQL Connector which allows you to connect Natively to MySQL instead of a web server. Obviously, the best practice is to use a web service API that does the database interaction, but sometimes, you just want to connect directly. Its been surprising how popular this library has been, receiving questions from people dealing with hundreds of thousands of records and university courses using it.

My main project at the moment is Test Track, a test planning and tracking service. I built this initially as a lof of the testing I did, and where I work used spreadsheets to keep track of tests. These can get out of hand very quickly, and they don't work very well if there's a number of people trying to update it and work collaboratively.

When I was looking at other tools, they were either too expensive for someone in my position such as an indiehacker, or were too complex for what I needed. So I built Test Track to be a simple and affordable solution for other developers and testers in similar situations. Its been a slow start with a couple of users at the moment (told you I'm not good at marketing) but my fulltime job is using it, so I'm dogfooding it every day, both personally and professionally.