Christopher Watford
Chief Technology Officer at New Hanover Regional Medical Center
Wilmington, North Carolina, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolChristopher Watford is a seasoned technology leader and CTO with 17 years of experience building distributed, data-driven systems across nuclear energy, industrial IoT, and market research. He blends deep scientific computing expertise with hands-on software craftsmanship—contributing to open-source projects like json-c and the MegaMek suite—while scaling engineering teams and delivering production-ready features. A paramedic and wilderness EMT who teaches EMS and HAZMAT life support, he uniquely pairs disaster medicine and frontline emergency experience with technical decision-making under pressure. His work emphasizes event-driven architectures, automation, and observability to optimize complex workflows in safety-critical domains. Based in Wilmington, NC, he enjoys tackling interdisciplinary problems at the intersection of cardiology, human performance analytics, and resilient system design. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic architectural judgment that balances regulatory rigor with rapid iteration.
17 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
Paramedic, Paramedic at Cape Fear Community CollegeJohn T HoggardBSc Computer Science - Systems, BSc Computer Science - Systems at University of North Carolina WilmingtonWilderness EMT Wilderness Emergency Medicine, Wilderness EMT Wilderness Emergency Medicine at National Outdoor Leadership School - Wilderness Medicine InstituteComputer Science - Engineering, Computer Science - Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Github Skills (17)
json10
debug10
c1110
java10
c1710
javas10
exception-handling10
user-interface9
ui-design9
interface-design9
code-formatting9
xml9
refactoring8
apidoc8
api8
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
MegaMek/mekhq
Jul 2018 - Jun 2021
MekHQ is a java helper program for the MegaMek game that allows users to load a list of entities from an XML file, perform repairs and customizations, and then save the new entities to another XML file that can be loaded into MegaMek.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:241 reviews, 1330 commits, 552 PRs in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Christopher contributed to the `MekHQ` project by addressing exceptions and improving code formatting within the `LogEntryController.java` file. Their commits demonstrate a focus on optimizing and enhancing the reliability of the software by removing potentially problematic regex expressions and improving error handling related to database interaction. The user also appears to have been involved in optimizing the performance of the code.
xmljavacustomizationsrepairs
json-c/json-c
May 2009 - Sep 2016
https://github.com/json-c/json-c is the official code repository for json-c. See the wiki for release tarballs for download. API docs at http://json-c.github.io/json-c/
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 1 PR, 1 comment in 7 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Christopher primarily contributed to the C codebase, fixing bugs and enhancing the project. The user addressed issues like removing literal characters from files, modifying the code to enable and disable the REFCOUNT_DEBUG feature, and updating code to use the correct variable declarations. The user also added const qualifiers to specific functions and updated the project version.
apijson-viewertarballscode-repositoryjson-data
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