Your
DIGITAL
INSIDER
About Techn
I’m Chris Chatterton, a digital architect and developer who has spent a lot of time working with WordPress, Salesforce and the systems that connect them. Along the way, I often build small utilities, plugins and tools to solve practical problems I encounter in real-world projects. Rather than keep those solutions to myself, I publish the ones that might be useful to others here under Techn.
You can browse the projects, source code and development history on GitHub.
But Techn is only one part of what I do. I’ve been working in digital for a long time, long enough to have gone from hand-coding websites to designing and architecting complex digital systems, and from being the person building the thing to leading teams and helping organisations work out what the thing should be in the first place.
Today there are probably three different sides of me you’ll encounter online.
01 /CHRIS
Think
Still fascinated by digital, still learning, writing and thinking about where our industry is going.
02 / ALPHASYS
Lead
Digital Capability Group Director, leading digital strategy and architecture with nonprofits and for-purpose organisations.
03 / TECHN
Build
The maker in me. Experimenting, writing code and building things simply because I think they should exist.
Naturally, those three worlds overlap. The experience I gain through my work shapes the things I think about personally, those ideas sometimes become experiments through Techn, and occasionally those experiments become useful tools that find their way back into real-world solutions. That’s part of what makes Techn fun. It doesn’t need a business plan or a product roadmap. It gives me somewhere to keep building, keep learning and, when something turns out to be genuinely useful, share it.
Built to be useful
Techn isn’t a software company or a commercial product business. It’s simply the name I use for my independent development work. Most Techn projects start with a problem worth solving. Sometimes that’s something I’ve encountered professionally. Sometimes it’s an idea I want to explore. Sometimes it’s just a small utility I think should exist. The common thread is that they’re designed to be practical, maintainable and useful.
Techn projects are publicly available and free to use. There are no premium editions, licence upgrades or sales funnels hiding behind them.
Techn and AlphaSys
The crossover between Techn and AlphaSys is quite deliberate. Working with nonprofits and for-purpose organisations means I often see small problems worth solving that don’t necessarily justify the cost or overhead of a formal commercial engagement. Techn gives me a way to contribute some of my own time, turn those ideas into reusable tools and make them freely available.
As a result, AlphaSys uses some Techn projects in customer solutions. They’re not proprietary AlphaSys software, nor are they products AlphaSys needs to buy from Techn. They’re simply open-source tools available to AlphaSys and everyone else on the same terms. When someone chooses to use a Techn project, they takes responsibility for its implementation and support within that customer’s solution. I continue to develop and maintain the underlying open-source project through Techn.
It’s a relationship I’m quite proud of. Sometimes the work I do inspires something I build, and sometimes something I build lets me give a little more back.
Open by default
I like the idea that a useful solution to a common problem shouldn’t necessarily stay locked inside the project where it was first needed. Publishing through Techn gives me somewhere to experiment, build and share those ideas independently while keeping them available to the broader WordPress community.
If something here solves a problem for you too, please feel free to use it.