Chris Male

Chris completed his degree in Software Engineering at Victoria in 2007, and went on to study for a Masters of Science (MSc) in Computer Science. During his final-year undergraduate project, he worked on a novel technique for eliminating null pointers in Java programs. This is the most common form of error that occurs in Java, and is estimated to have cost the IT industry well over one billion dollars. For his Master's thesis, Chris worked on improving the Java programming language with a technique called type inference. The aim here was to reduce the amount of unnecessary program code that a developer must write, thereby reducing their workload and allowing them to focus on more important tasks.

During his Master's work, Chris moved to Amsterdam and completed his studies there. Once they were completed, he took up a job with a local IT company specialising in enterprise Java. Here, he worked with a variety of advanced software frameworks, tools and techniques. These include the Spring framework, Google web toolkit, Hibernate/JPA and the new NoSQL databases.

Chris also worked heavily with the open source search application and library, Apache Solr and Lucene, where he created powerful search systems for use in web applications. He has been very involved in two features of Solr and Lucene, the first being spatial search, allowing users to incorporate geographical locations in their search criteria; and the second in providing techniques for analysing more of the world's languages, including Māori, as part of the search process.

Having worked in Europe for several years now, Chris has obtained invaluable skills and experience that are opening up many opportunities. One day Chris hopes to return home and start his own software company.