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 Some of our community may recognize Christian’s name, as he played an integral part of our team during the time that we were building out our current platform in late 2014/early 2015. We were sad to see him return to his native Sweden in early 2015, but when the tables turned a year later we were so excited to welcome him back to our Product Team!


The Early Years
Christian, who is originally from Sweden, decided to study abroad after high school and joined Johnson & Wales University in his hometown Göteborg where they had an international campus. After spending a year at the main campus in Rhode Island working as assistant webmaster, he and his roommates decided to transfer to the Miami campus, where he completed his bachelors in International Business Management.

As part of his internship, he convinced his career counselor to do an IT internship, which landed him at Burger King corporation in 2002. This was the start of his career in programming, and for the next 8-9 years he worked as a .NET consultant for various companies while simultaneously completing a MBA in Entrepreneurship Finance from Nova Southeastern University. While working at a travel company in 2007, one of his co-workers introduced him to Ruby on Rails, and from that point onward, he knew he wanted to start working with open source. A few years later, a good friend encouraged him to start a Python/Django meetup group in Miami, which eventually provided him with a ticket out of the enterprise world into the startup realm. Christian then spent a few years as a tech lead building products for startups, which involved a lot of client-side JavaScript frameworks and botanizing exotic backend technologies.

 

Team BrightGauge
Based on his experience in building highly scalable, front-end heavy web applications, Christian was originally recruited to the team to help rewrite the core BrightGauge platform. He joined in 2013 and he and the team helped write and design most of the app as it exists today.

Christian enjoys building products and tinkering with frontend stuff. The thing that attracted him most to BrightGauge was that it’s a fun and challenging product to scale both UX-wise, as well as technically.

 

Up Close & Personal
Christian enjoys playing guitar in his spare time and has an ever growing collection of instruments, to his wife's great dismay. Among his prized possessions are a Martin HD-28 and a cherry Gibson ES-335, which he uses to create music of the old masters such as Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, Elmore James, Albert King, Little Milton, Howlin Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins and a whole slew of other weird artists that your parents/grandparents might have listened to 50 years ago.

In addition to his music hobby, Christian also enjoys hanging out with his family and drawing or building Lego creations with his daughter.

Christian Toivola

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