Chris Pirich
Co-Founder, CTO at Self-Employed
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChris Pirich is a seasoned software leader and founder with 30+ years in the industry and a hands-on full-stack background spanning generative AI, cloud platforms, async systems, UI, social networking, gaming, and entertainment. As Co-Founder and CTO of Empwr.ai and a long-time independent consultant, he combines strategic product leadership with deep engineering execution across startups and large organizations, including a long tenure at Microsoft driving Xbox and Windows experiences. He has a history of shipping client-facing mobile and web products (Hulu, Convoy, TraceMe/Nike acquisition) and pioneering browser-based learning tools at Code.org, where he helped build in-browser JavaScript interpreters and IDEs. An active contributor to open-source projects, his fixes to projects like NeilFraser/JS-Interpreter and enhancements to the p5play game engine demonstrate attention to robust runtime behavior and polished front-end game mechanics. Based in Seattle and grounded in an Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Michigan, he pairs entrepreneurial grit with system-level thinking and a knack for turning complex async architectures into pragmatic, shippable systems.
13 years of coding experience
30 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science in Engineering Electrical Engineering, Bachelor of Science in Engineering Electrical Engineering at University of Michigan College of Engineering
Github Skills (8)
debugging10
sandbox10
debug10
javascript10
exception-handling10
game-development10
p5js10
game-engine10
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
NeilFraser/JS-Interpreter
Sep 2015 - Feb 2016
A sandboxed JavaScript interpreter in JavaScript.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 commits, 2 PRs, 5 comments in 5 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on fixing bugs and improving the JavaScript interpreter within the repository. Their contributions addressed issues related to exception handling, particularly around undefined functions and constructor return values. The user also implemented fixes for primitive constructors and corrected issues with the `toString()` method for the `NUMBER` object.
javascriptsandboxsandboxedinterpreterjs-interpreter
quinton-ashley/p5play
Apr 2016 - May 2016
JavaScript game engine that uses q5.js/p5.js for graphics and Box2D for physics.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 4 PRs, 13 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Chris primarily focused on enhancing the `p5play` game engine. Their contributions centered on refining the `Sprite` class by implementing features like bidirectional `rotateToDirection` functionality and making the `angle` parameter optional within the `setSpeed` method. Furthermore, the user addressed code quality by renaming internal variables for better clarity, aligning the code with established best practices. They also updated the code to use the p5.js angle mode settings (degrees or radians).
js-librarygamesjavascriptbox2dp5-js
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