Chris Schmidt

A long, long time ago a young programmer had a vision. This vision was one where applications could be both secure and usable. They could be both rich with content yet performant and responsive. Every day we draw a little closer to this dream in a lot of aspects, yet it seems that every so often we take one step forward and twelve steps back. My mission is to help eliminate those steps backward; to help technology continue to innovate and move forward at lightning speed while maintaining a rigorous model where security and usability work hand in hand and where developers can get in front of the security problem rather than reacting to it.

I speak at conferences about building secure software and scaling application security to today's development paradigms. We no longer live in a world where developers write software from the ground up - everything is a mash-up, a collaboration of frameworks tied together delicately by an army of developers then pushed out and shared to the world.

I also study social engineering, physical security, incident response and forensics and am an avid tinkerer, tearing apart a great many things and putting them together again just to learn what makes them tick, then coming up with interesting ways to make them do what they're supposed to do, but do it better. I don't always succeed, but without failure progress is meaningless. I am a perpetual student of life and technology - a day without a lesson is a day wasted.