Ask the Programmer
Ask The Programmer Episode 245 - Guest Chris Kelly Shares his Career Shift to IT and AV
21 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
From the world of AV programming and control with James King, I'm Steve Greenblatt, and this is Ask the Programmer. James, how are you today? We have a special guest with us and looking forward to a great conversation.
I'm doing good, Steve. It's always great when we have a guest, especially a fellow higher ed guest. So I'm looking forward to this. How are you doing?
Not too bad. Not too bad. I'll tell you one thing. Our guests are really working for us. We're getting lots and lots of downloads. So we appreciate that and love having interesting guests who have an audience and have great things to share. So if you haven't caught some of our recent episodes, please do. Lots of great stuff there. And so check those out. So
Not to put the pressure on, but without further ado, we have our guest for today. He is Chris Kelly. He's the Senior IT Support Specialist at Creighton University. He's also HETMA Advisory Board Chair. Welcome, Chris. Thanks for being with us. Good morning. Thank you.
Long-time listener, first-time caller. Very excited to be here and joining you guys. This is definitely a podcast that I listen to and keep updated on, so it's very exciting.
We appreciate that. You just won us over. So thanks. Thanks for that. And just- Here's your check.
It's in the mail.
Yes. Chris is a very smart guy. So please follow his lead. Many zeros in that, right? So, Chris, when we have a guest, we like to let them introduce themselves and share a little bit about their AV background and, of course, highlight things pertaining to programming, but let us know how you got into this wonderful industry.
Yeah, so I've actually only been doing this sort of work for a little over two years. Before that time, I had a complete career shift. I had been doing social work for a little over, right around a decade. My master's is actually in counseling with a school specialization, so I could be a licensed K-12 school counselor.
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Chapter 2: How did Chris Kelly transition from social work to IT?
But I'm a real lifelong learner type. So most of my free time is spent learning about something.
Really cool. Obviously, there's an inherent desire and something that's bringing you to doing what you're doing. And just the fact that you stay at it is really impressive. Yeah. Go ahead.
Go ahead, James.
No, I was just saying, no, that's just similar. I can fully understand. The one thing I kind of find humorous is how college classes, and yes, we are in higher ed here, can help shape that. I didn't do CS. I did IS, information systems. And the reason why was I didn't want to take math classes. And there's like, and then I find myself doing programs.
So I did a little programming in college because most of the information system was more on the business side of things and less on a programming side. So it was like, but here I am, co-host of Ask the Programmer. I was the AV programmer. Like, it's just, like, it's humorous, I find.
Everything is very circuitous. You know, you never know exactly where it's going to end up. I mean, at this point, I'm fairly confident with kind of what I do with GCP. Um, I, we had, um, GV for extra stood up, but a lot of bad data when I started. And so one of my early projects was, okay, I want this to be a worthwhile thing for us.
And to do that, I had to go around and basically update almost every controller we had to work better with GV because. We didn't have output reporting going correctly to GVE. We had some old spaces that were no longer existent. So I just purged it all, cleared out the SQL database and just started fresh.
And I had to learn how to do some of the output reporting for GVE gets complicated when you're needing to try and say, okay, some of the if then logic of if this button is pushed this room has these displays, so these displays will go to local, and these ones will then need to be on this.
So just some of the logic for making sure the output reporting was good, because we realized if we didn't have output reporting set right, it was flooding our SQL database with bad data, and it was just filling it up, and that took a lot of learning to kind of figure out the logic for each of these controllers to get it And then also the ones that are Python to try and get the stuff set up right.
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Chapter 3: What certifications did Chris pursue to enter the AV industry?
Now, yes, Kobe was doing it at a higher level, but same concept. So the coach went up to him and go, you're one of the greatest out here. Why are you wasting your time with the basics? And Kobe's response was, I am one of the greatest because I focus on the basics.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. You need a solid foundation to be able to build upon, and then you start to be able to do some of the more complicated things. But I can relate very much, Chris, to what you're saying is that it's very hard to start with a medium-sized or a large-sized project in programming. And
And that used to be a challenge that we would have when we would try to bring somebody new to our team. We said, we don't really get easy projects because people don't hire us for those. So if you get an opportunity to do an easy project, take advantage of it. And plus also with the road that you're going down, being able to have more influence over the design that can really benefit you as well.
Definitely. And then the last advice I would get is even if you have a complicated project, cool. Break it down in chunks. As we always say, best way to eat an elephant, one bite at a time. I remember my first large-scale coding project I did. all custom code and stuff. I was like lost. I was like, what, like, how am I going to do this?
This was a room with three projectors, 20 different locations. Electrons could be plugged in, two different electrons, a lot of routing. At first I was like,
need to turn on the projectors i know how to do that so i coded that first and then just you start adding to it and it's like a snowball effect you add a little bit here a bit here and all of a sudden you got this big snowball or this big program or the other uh something they're talking about is the flywheel you know you turn the flywheel you're turning and turning and then all of a sudden it gets going
Well, what got it going? Was it the first push? Was it the hundred push? You don't really know. It really, you just got to keep building on it.
The nice part about that too, is once you have something that you know works, you can then use it for the next project as well. So it's, you know, start to build your library.
Well, and I will acknowledge that a big help in learning more of those things has been my connections through HEPMA.
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Chapter 4: What role does Chris play at Creighton University?
You know, that's how I first learned about, you know, James and then finding you guys podcast and I'm in the Slack group. And again, still fairly new to all the things, but just looking for ways to get involved in networking and finding people to talk to and,
That was how, oh, a little over a year ago, I saw that there was a vacancy for the advisory board chair with HEPMA and just started talking with the board and jumped in. And there was not a lot going on with that position beforehand. So I've kind of crafted it within the vision that we had and
Now it's something that's happening almost weekly and getting good connections with people from, you know, all of Hema's major sponsors and just getting more and more involved in the community and learning about more people and finding out different things that way.
Great segue there. Something that we wanted to touch on. And honestly, use your background too. You do have a different approach than many of us coming from your social work background and being personable and having those people skills. That goes a long way, especially, and it's different from many of the people that are very, very technical.
I will say that I mean, I would not consider myself an extrovert by any means. College helped me gain my, you know, a part of going to school for counseling is you have to not only go in and be the counselor for people, but you have to go and get counseling as well. And then you have to record yourself doing those things and, you know, seeing how you interact and
Yeah, sometimes it's not the social skills that you have, but it's what you gain by going through a program and learning those things that you know might definitely would not have been a strong before that so Gaining those things.
It's sort of like your, your gen eds or anything else like it may not be the class that you wanted in college, but you're still gaining critical thinking you're gaining social skills, you're gaining all the things from spaces that might not have been your focus
Absolutely. That's probably a good place for us to, to, uh, wrap this one up, but we're definitely going to have Chris back for the next episode. So stay tuned for that. Um, and, uh, we're going to learn more about, um, him and, and, um, and some of the work that he's doing as well as, you know, talk about some more topics related to programming, uh,
Until then, Chris, can you let our audience know how to get in touch with you, learn more about what you're doing at Creighton as well as with HEPMA?
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