Since there’s enough to get by with on the front page, I assume you’re here for the longer version, so… here we go!
First things first
Self-biographies are a bit weird. No two ways around it. But they do give us a chance to think about how we present ourselves to the world. So when I say —
I’m Chris Krycho — a follower of Christ, a husband, and a dad. I’m a software engineer by trade; a theologian by vocation; and a writer, runner and cyclist, composer, and erstwhile podcaster by hobby.
— well, the order is careful and the word choice precise. The first things on my personal bio, “a follower of Christ, a husband, and a dad,” are where they are because everything else on the list is both less important than those first three and profoundly informed by them.
A follower of Christ
The single most important fact of my life is that, to quote Saint Paul: I am not my own, but I was bought with a price — and that price was the death of Jesus Christ, God-the-Son, in my place.1
I am specifically an Anglican Christian in the historic Reformed tradition — aiming always to be irenic, catholic, and orthodox.
A husband and a dad
After following Christ, my family is far and away the most important part of my life. Jaimie and I got married in July 2009, and our daughters Elayne and Kate were born in May 2012 and May 2014.
(This site focuses on my public thinking; for occasional family updates see Not a Hint of Hyperbole.)
By trade
Since graduating college, I have been working more or less full-time in the software industry. I starting out writing avionics software and then hazards and risk mitigation software for the energy industry. After picking up web development on the side, I eventually transitioned into web development full time. You can see my CV for the nitty-gritty professional-historical details! Below are just the salient bits of what I’m doing right now.
Most recently I was a Senior Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn, working on front-end infrastructure for what most people think of when you say LinkedIn: the app you sign into, send messages and read updates on, etc. For the past few years, I served as the tech lead for the flagship app and as the primary subject matter expert for LinkedIn’s TypeScript adoption effort. In 2021 I led LinkedIn’s adoption of Ember Octane — a project I had been doing prep work for in the app since August 2019. I was also a member of the Ember Framework core team, and since 2017 (well before I joined LinkedIn) I was one of several people driving forward TypeScript adoption in the Ember community — culminating with the creation of the Ember TypeScript core team in 2022.
By vocation
I have increasingly come to see much of my calling in life as that of the public theologian. Doing public theology means (at least) two things:
- doing theological work for the church in public
- doing theological work from the church for the public
When I am doing theological work for the church in public, I aim for the good of the church. It is not merely for intellectual interest; when it is, I’m off the rails. The point of this kind of public theology is to equip other Christians to think well: God and his work in our world, and of our right response to his work.
When I am doing theological work from the church for the public, I aim for the good of the world in which the church is set. As with work for the church, this cannot be merely a matter of satisfying my curiosity. It also cannot be done solo: “public theology” done outside the church — that is, not from the church — is also off the rails. My aims in this mode are to make Christianity intelligible to those for whom it is simply perplexing, and to apply robustly Christian thought to matters of the day.
These two modes are complements — not competitors. Done well, each benefits the other.
By hobby
A writer
Since college, I have written — a lot — primarily on various iterations of chriskrycho.com, but also occasionally at Mere Orthodoxy, and between January 2018 and June 2020 also in my newsletter. I increasingly conceive of my public writing along two axes:
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public theology: writing in line with that vocation of public theologian is the work that I care most about, though it is also the work that is hardest in many ways: it’s where the bar is highest.
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public learning: encouraging a culture of learning by sharing what I’m learning — both so that the things I learn, others gain benefit from, and so that I myself have a good trail to follow in the future!
A runner
Since 2010, I have been a long-distance runner. A bout of mono left me incredibly weak, and a desire to get back in shape to play Ultimate with friends led me to spend a lot of time running over the next year. The running stuck: I miss playing Ultimate, but nothing stops me from running regularly. I’ve also completed a super sprint triathlon, and cycle regularly… but running is my favorite.
A composer
In high school and college, I studied and practiced musical composition, mostly in a neoclassical/neoromantic vein. That interest lay dormant for most of a decade after college. I composed the processional for my own wedding as well as both of my little sisters’ weddings and the themes for all of my podcasts, but little else. Then, in 2020, I picked back up my composer’s pen and have not put it down.
My most interesting published work to date is Fanfare for a New Era of American Spaceflight, which I recorded with the Budapest Scoring Orchestra. I am also hard at work on a large-scale symphonic work, along with some chamber works and some church music. Some or all of that may appear here in the future!
Beyond that, you can check out a limited sample of my work on SoundCloud, as well as the ‘music’ tag on this site.
An erstwhile podcaster
In January 2014, my long-time friend Stephen Carradini and I launched Winning Slowly — a podcast about tech, religion, ethics, and art. He called it a tech podcast with other angles; I called it our excuse to talk about literally every part of human existence. We were both right. And you wouldn’t be wrong to see it as another spot where I consciously practiced public theology.
Out of that initial experiment grew a general interest in podcasting as a medium, and a variety of podcasts I’ve hosted over the years:
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New Rustacean — my 3½-year-long podcast about the Rust programming language, in which I tried something that as far as I know no one else had done before: teaching a programming language through a podcast.
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Sap.py — an early foray into podcasting with my wife during her brief experiment learning Python
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Run With Me — an experimental “microcast” (with episodes always under 10 minutes long), recorded while running at various points in 2016.
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Mass Affection — another foray into podcasting with my wife, this time about the video game series Mass Effect. We aspire to finish this… eventually. It’s been hard to carve out the time for it the last couple years, but we always enjoy it when we do!
I find podcasting a great complement to writing. It is available in spaces and places where people cannot read (like commuting), and it’s also a great place to flesh out thoughts I have already put in writing or am trying to figure out how to put in writing. While I am not currently producing any podcasts, I will not rule out the possibility of doing so again in the future — and I am happy to be a guest on other podcasts!
Notes
Paul was writing specifically about sexual immorality — but the form of his argument is to ground that specific injunction in a very sweeping, indeed a totalizing, claim about the Christian life. ↩︎