Chris Crocker-white
Co-Chief Executive Officer at balena
Bude, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Crocker-white is an engineering generalist and executive with 11 years of hands-on experience blending product, UX, software and electronics—now serving as Co-CEO of balena from Bude, UK. He progressed through technical and product leadership roles at balena, moving from hardware hacker-in-residence to head of product and CPO before taking the co-CEO seat, demonstrating an unusual mix of maker-level embedded skills and strategic product ownership. His open-source contributions to well-known balena projects include practical embedded work—Bluetooth, Airplay and Spotify integration for balenaSound and operational enhancements for Raspberry Pi dashboards—showing he still ships code and ops improvements. Trained in electrical and electronic systems, he brings both hardware fluency and product instincts to lead developer-focused IoT platforms.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Electrical and Electronic Systems, Bachelor of Science - BS, Electrical and Electronic Systems at University of Plymouth
Github Skills (20)
markdown10
cron10
docker10
scripting10
configuration-management10
bash10
airplay10
bluetooth-le10
dockers10
doc10
audio10
script10
markdown-it10
sys10
bluetooth10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
balena-labs-projects/balena-dash
Nov 2018 - Nov 2022
Build a Raspberry Pi based desktop dashboard for stats, photos, videos and more!
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:2 reviews, 58 commits, 31 PRs in 4 years
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on enhancing the operational aspects of the `balena-dash` project. They implemented a scheduler for the Raspberry Pi's backlight, using cron jobs to control the backlight's on and off times. Additionally, the user integrated wifi-connect functionality, allowing the dashboard to connect to Wi-Fi networks. They also improved the system's configurability by introducing environment variables for managing the backlight and launching applications.
raspberry-pioctoprintvideosraspberrybalena
balena-io-experimental/balena-sound
Apr 2019 - Nov 2022
Build a single or multi-room streamer for an existing audio device using a Raspberry Pi! Supports Bluetooth, Airplay and Spotify Connect
Role in this project:Back-end & Embedded Systems Engineer
Back-end & Embedded Systems EngineerContributions:4 reviews, 84 commits, 62 PRs in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the Bluetooth audio functionality, Airplay streaming, and Spotify integration within the balenaSound project. Their work involved modifying shell scripts to configure audio output, set system volumes, and manage Bluetooth device naming. They added support for Airplay and digital volume settings. The user also appears to be involved in integrating Spotify and Airplay functionality alongside Bluetooth audio streaming on the Raspberry Pi device.
bluetooth-audiospotify-connectsnapcastraspberry-pibalena
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