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Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder, Six Feet Up
Major company achievements during tenure: Since founding custom-software developer Six Feet Up in 1999, Calvin Hendryx-Parker has grown the company from two employees to more than 30. Six Feet Up describes itself as a “Python and AI-for-good expert consulting company” with a focus on climate action, clean energy, food sustainability, and good health and well-being. Recent Six Feet Up projects include helping a climate tech startup that developed a model for predicting lightning and assisting a client with a climate initiative to predict the direction of forest fires to help save the lives of countless firefighters. Hendryx-Parker is leading his team to deploy a new portal for one of the NASA New Horizon teams to analyze the data coming back from the space probe. In 2022, he helped spearhead Six Feet Up’s participation in Pledge 1%, a global movement in which companies donate 1% of their time, product and/or equity to any charity of their choosing.
Challenge faced: “When you develop technology for your company (such as a software application), it is a living thing that needs care and feeding. Every dependency you have in your software stack has bugs that will be addressed and will have an effect on what you have built for better or worse.”
First computer: Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. “I spent many hours typing in programs from the back of computer magazines in BASIC to play sounds or animations on the screen.”
The road: Hendryx-Parker graduated from Purdue University during the late-1990s dot-com boom, then moved to San Francisco, where he worked for a French-based consumer software company as a user-interface designer. He moved on to be a system administrator for the visual effects company that did the movie “The Matrix,” then settled into a B2B marketplace startup as a system engineer. In 1999, he co-founded Six Feet Up, and in 2003, he and his wife and co-founder, Gabrielle, moved to Indiana.
Favorite gadget: The Ricoh Theta 360 SC camera. “Whether I’m attending a concert, snowboarding down the mountain or presenting a talk at a conference, it’s awesome to capture 360 photos and videos.”
Preferred work atmosphere: “I’m comfortable just about any place I can open up my laptop.”
I wish people understood: “It can be tempting to look at software you interact with on a daily basis—like Facebook or Amazon—and ask if you can include a feature one of these platforms has built into your software project. While we do build software on top of reusable frameworks, it is rarely trivial to copy a feature from a large platform without a lot of effort.”
Free time: summer trips to France; outdoor activities, including hiking, camping and running•
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