Summary: I'm a hacker, which means I do spend a lot of the time at the computer, but I'm a swimmer and active so I'm not gross or anti-social. I do lots of computer stuff and it takes time to learn, do, understand, etc. so I spend a lot of time doing computer things. Oh yea, and I also tell you, idk why, about how my website has gone though a lot of versions which is how I learned all this web development stuff in the first place.

If somehow you didn’t catch the name: It’s Chris Portela and I’m a Web Developer/Designer, hacker, swimmer, thinker, and High School student.

I am a someone with a clear hacker mindset with big dreams for my future in computers. I primarily work with Linux although lately I’ve been working in Windows again to use some of the tools I’ve been missing as well as being able to run Windows Apps in a native environment (oh boy I’m getting fancy). Skipping the details, I like Linux and entirely support the Open-Source movement and free information, plus if you know what that meant then you got some nice brownie points.

I do get off my chair, although to many it’s a surprise that I do considering how much I know of computers in comparison, to be swimming with a club USA swim team twice a day and playing airsoft pretty regularly or at least as much as possible. So no I am not at the computer all day long… but I’m definately there a lot of the time. In reality to be good at anything you need to spend lots of time with it. Computers is no different and if you know computers even a little it’s understandable to spend so much time here with so much to learn or simply be aware of.

I’d note thought, before you write me off as some guy who just sits at the computer all day as a weird/bad thing, that most people I know are on Facebook all day long or watching videos while I learn about computers and how to make them tick. I’m sure there can’t be many more Tosh.O shows so the prospects of making money from watching videos is probably lower than learning about how computers actually work and playing with them. Long story short: My time is a bit more productive than the usual teen which spends about the same time or more at the computer or Xbox 360/PS3.

Delving in to some detail about my tech skills however, I’ve become adept in PHP, the CakePHP framework, C#.NET, some WPF/WCF, and ASP.NET while also becoming pretty good at Java, C, and Bash scripting. I am learning and getting better each day at using those languages/tools and also want to learn Python, Android development, C++, Java, JavaScript(jQuery), and of course much more.(It’s an Achilles heel of mine to try to learn so much all the time.)

A short history about this website

Enough about me specifically, now a little history lesson on how I got this website, what I use it for, why I use it that way and how it got to be this way specifically. This website started in 2006 as a way for me to learn to make websites. I was in maybe 6th grade at the time and my dad got me this website. I really only got ‘chris-portela.com’ just because my dad’s company website had a ‘-’ in it and he recommended it. It’s been the source of some confusion for some time and so I bought ‘chrisportela.com’ recently. I’ve made the switch to that new domain and now both are working and point to the same place, including emails.

Since 2006 I’ve made so many versions of my website I was actually up to major version 8 before this WordPress website. I had learned php, and I made such a horrible website with it, which taught me, brutally, how important keeping your code clean and organized was. That PHP web site (Chris-Portela.com V6) was scrapped because I guess somewhere a bit got changed and it crashed the entire website and the bug was unfixable (I sort of explain here). I created two very good ASP.NET websites. The 2nd one however, never had it’s updating application finished so I had to scrap the website. Although it was a great website I didn’t want have to keep updating it with one version of MSSQL manager or another(which worked good sometimes and sometimes… not so good). I just simply did not have the time to manage that website using that method nor to finish the admin application because using that method required a lot of time. Not to mention I would get side-tracked when I got frustrated and try to work on the WPF website manager and get stuck on something that I just didn’t have the time to implement. This is why my website is not a custom ultra-high tech website I may be expected to have and actually did have. This is just simply easier and smarter for me. Now it’s just my blog and while I have plans to create small sub-websites to provide special functionality in the future right now it’s just my blog.

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Contacting me

My Email: chris <#> chrisportela com

My Online profiles: (Click Me:Online at the top of the page!)