I’m Chris Branch, and I’ve been a programmer since I was 7. I got better…

For the past 5 years I’ve worked for Cloudflare, making the web faster, safer, more reliable, and only occasionally breaking it. I was part of the original team for Warp and Argo Tunnel and have worked on many of the myriad security, optimisation and DDoS protection features available through Cloudflare. I also convert lava lamps into random numbers.

I got started trying to make simple games for the Amiga and automating some housekeeping tasks – setting up libraries and ASSIGNs, boring things like that. Soon I jumped ship to Windows, making better games and more fully-featured apps for friends, family and school. A slight deviation occurred when I wrote a FreeCell clone and music composer for a little Psion organiser; after typing on that tiny keyboard, even netbooks are a luxury.

Then I got stuck programming in C++ for 12 years; chasing game development will do that to you. I followed the development of new standards and even attended the odd C++ conference. Now I’m a rehabilitated Go and Rust programmer.

As a creature of the internet, I’m also proficient in JavaScript, CSS and HTML5. I’ve built many web sites, apps, games and screen-scraping enhancements for third-party websites. It’s been a long way since I abandoned FrontPage in 2001 and displayed a tiny image on my homepage, ‘Built with Notepad!’ I only hope my Pokemon fansite disappeared in the great purge of GeoCities.