Chris Burgess
Committee Member at Catalyst IT Limited
Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
RockstarChris Burgess is a seasoned developer with 19 years' experience based in Dunedin, New Zealand, who blends pragmatic engineering with open source advocacy. As a senior developer at Catalyst IT and long-time contributor to Drupal and CiviCRM, he specializes in backend systems, payment processing, caching, and integration work that keeps complex civic platforms reliable. He also serves on the DrupalSouth committee and runs his own firm, Giant Robot, combining community leadership with hands-on delivery. Known for anticipating problems before they surface, he emphasizes open data and transparent work practices to reduce friction across teams. His contributions to core CiviCRM and Drupal modules include subtle yet impactful fixes—SSL handling, cache keys, timezone and Views enhancements—that improve stability for many downstream users. Outside code, he describes himself humorously as someone who makes delicious lemonade, signaling a practical, creative approach to problem solving.
19 years of coding experience
Stackoverflow
3,581reputation
1.1mreached
36answers
20questions
Github Skills (22)
apim10
caching10
drupal10
civicrm10
multiview10
php10
payment-processing10
api10
pageviews10
curl9
sql8
testing8
mysql8
database-design7
nginx6
Programming languages (29)
Github contributions (5)
civicrm/civicrm-drupal
Jun 2014 - Sep 2017
CiviCRM (Drupal Integration)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:22 commits, 21 PRs, 11 comments in 3 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Chris's contributions focused on enhancing the Drupal integration for CiviCRM, specifically within the Views module. They implemented features to support float data, expose custom field values, and display currency amounts without formatting. Additionally, the user addressed timezone handling and addressed code related to showing all groups within the system, improving the module's functionality and flexibility. Furthermore, the user included a whitespace commit, likely for cleanup.
civicrmdrupal
civicrm/civicrm-core
May 2013 - Feb 2020
CiviCRM (Core Application and Framework)
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:131 commits, 81 PRs, 3 branches in 6 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the core payment processing functionality within the CiviCRM application. Their work included correcting typos in messaging related to the "Payflow Pro" payment processor, modifying the code to align with API interactions, and adjusting caching mechanisms to avoid whitespace conflicts with Memcache. The user also addressed issues related to SSL detection within the system and implemented improvements to the cache key generation.
civicrmcrm-platformdcode-2025nonprofit
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