Chris Hanson
Chief Executive Officer at Base Hit Ventures LLC
Cupertino, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Hanson is a seasoned software leader and CEO based in Cupertino with 12+ years of hands-on engineering and executive experience spanning embedded systems, test automation, and developer tooling. He spent two decades at Apple as a Developer Tools Engineer, bringing deep expertise in building reliable developer-facing systems and improving software quality. As an active open-source contributor, Chris has strengthened Swift's XCTest framework by improving assertions and error handling and contributed hardware emulation for MAME, evidencing low-level understanding of embedded architectures. He founded and led companies including Base Hit Ventures and bDistributed, blending product strategy with pragmatic engineering execution. Known for translating complex hardware and tooling problems into robust, testable solutions, he pairs systems-level thinking with a focus on developer productivity. His background suggests an uncommon mix of firmware-level emulation work and high-scale developer tools experience, making him effective at bridging hardware, tooling, and leadership.
12 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Carnegie Mellon University
Github Skills (9)
embedded10
error-handling10
swift10
c-language10
cprogramming-language10
sys10
xctest10
test-automation10
scsi8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
mamedev/mame
Jun 2017 - Jan 2026
MAME
Role in this project:
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:12 reviews, 7 PRs, 21 comments in 8 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Chris's contributions focus on emulating various single-board computers within the MAME project. They implemented support for the Motorola MEX68KECB Educational Computer Board, including initial hardware definition and features such as an "Abort" button. The user also added the Marion Systems MS68K single-board computer, and added tape devices to the default SCSI configurations. Their work demonstrates a deep understanding of embedded systems architecture and hardware emulation.
mame
swiftlang/swift-corelibs-xctest
Dec 2015 - Jan 2016
The XCTest Project, A Swift core library for providing unit test support
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:9 commits, 1 PR, 9 pushes in 1 month
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributed to the XCTest project by adding and modifying assertions and testing functionalities. They implemented support for unexpected failures, refactored messaging related to assertions, and added an XCTAssertThrowsError assertion. Furthermore, they adjusted the code to allow test methods to throw errors, treating them as unexpected failures. This work focuses on improving the test framework's robustness and error handling.
core-libraryswiftunit-testxctest
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