Chris Lyons

I began in tech like many others, my parents hand-me-downs! I spent my high school years building computers for friends and hosting and desiging lan parties for Doom matches.

After graduating Penn State with a B.S. in Computer Science I immeidately went to work for a small defense contractor cutting my teeth on tomcat and JSP applications before receiving an offer from USPS as a java developer.

The USPS datacenter was home to a great many applications and technologies and I tried to take full advantage and learn everything I could. I worked up the ranks from developer to Sr. Systems Engineer progressively taking on more and more responsibility.

In my final years at USPS I was the architect responsible for cns.usps.com and poboxes.usps.com among other applications and responsibilities. These applications were among the first to be built in a microservices architecture.

These applications were orignally built using Apache struts frameworks which was a comfortable approach used at the datacenter. I spent effort and time to document and design an approach for microservices migration that gained the confidence of management and the team and built a roadmap for others to follow to a microservices future.

I was also responsible for the epayroll system which was one of the first US Govt systems to show paystubs online in near realtime as they were processed.

I moved then to a career with Accenture where I joined the team of an AI/ML application for a national media/entertainment company. This was an exciting leap from legacy J2EE applications to fully modern cloud services.

In this role I built additional components for integration with a survey provider, migrated core services from a legacy J2EE system to AWS cloud microservices, and built tools for source code security review and monitoring.

Roles I would be good in: