Chris Adams

Software Developer at Library of Congress

Washington, District of Columbia, United States

About

Open source developer combining strong technical experience with a track record of working closely with users at all levels to understand the larger business environment and solve the right problems. Areas of interest: the open web, cloud computing and large-scale system administration, digital preservation, usability

Experience

  • Information Technology Specialist at Library of Congress
    Sep 2010 - Present · 15 yrs 11 mos

    * Lead developer for the World Digital Library (http://www.wdl.org/), a multi-lingual website presenting culturally-significant items from hundreds of partners to a global audience. Oversaw a complete back-end overhaul, including migration to a cloud environment, extensive web performance optimizations, and a complete responsive redesign. * Worked closely with the rest of WDL team to redesign business processes which reduced bottlenecks, improved reliability, and increased total throughput in every area of the project * Deployed full-text search for WDL's collection using Tesseract OCR and Apache Solr to make hundreds of thousands of scanned pages searchable. Worked with peers to adopt similar approaches for the general collections. * Helped with the release of many Library open source projects and improving participation in the greater open source community by Library developers * Used OpenCV to generate higher-resolution versions for thousands of low-resolution manually-generated thumbnails to support the new web design * Developed the first successful system used by the US Copyright Office to process electronic deposit deliveries * Acted as a technical expert on digital preservation and related issues, advising colleagues on internal and external challenges and participating in Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative meetings regarding long-term viability of JPEG 2000 content. * Added International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) APIs to the World Digital Library, worked on the general loc.gov implementation, and participated in IIIF standards and tool development * Met with senior management to address developer productivity and IT operational concerns, playing a significant ongoing role in the modernization effort

  • Software Developer at CACI International Inc
    Apr 2010 - Sep 2010 · 6 mos

    Working on Python-based projects for the Library of Congress

  • Software Developer V at InDyne Inc. - NASA
    Jun 2009 - Apr 2010 · 11 mos

    Python/Django developer. Most notable project: converting the legacy CMS behind science.nasa.gov to a scalable Django/FeinCMS-based site Built internal systems & processes to raise the level of testing, code-quality and deployment for our sites

  • Senior Technology Analyst at Yale University
    Jun 2008 - May 2009 · 1 yr

    Enterprise system interfaces & web development

  • System Administrator at Salk Institute
    Jul 2001 - May 2008 · 6 yrs 11 mos

    System and network administration, software and web development