Who’s behind QRLife

Jamie Christopher “Chris” Bayne — founder and developer of QRLife.me. Twenty-five years of enterprise backup and disaster recovery, pointed at a very small problem.

The start was less linear. Senior year of high school, Chris taught a class. An actual class — students enrolled, field trips, a guidance counselor signing off on the whole thing — called Advanced Automotive Mechanics. He was not, it turned out, permitted in the teachers’ lounge. He found that out the hard way. The class took a donated PowerPC, wired it into a car, and built voice control for the secondary systems — headlights, wipers, the things you shouldn’t take your hands off the wheel for. They lined up sponsors. They got a working prototype. It ran off a wall outlet, which was admittedly the part that needed work. Every car on the road does this now and nobody thinks about it.

The first real job was at Lockheed, starting on tickets and ending up running the server environment for the presentation team — the group that writes the packages that win the big government contracts. File, print, mail: a small, locked-down data center for information that was not permitted to leave the room. It is a good place to learn that the interesting part of any system is not what it does. It is what it takes to keep it running.

The tech career proper started on the phones — technical support engineer at VERITAS in Orlando, fifteen to twenty-five calls a day, writing knowledge base articles between them. What followed was two decades of sales engineering and architecture at VERITAS, Symantec, Dell and Infrascale — flying to Fortune 500 sites to run disaster recovery tests, architecting cloud failover, and finishing as Chief Solution Architect building out a solutions engineering team. The job never really changed. It was always the same question: what happens when this stops working?

That question is why QRLife exists in the shape it does. Most QR and link services are somebody’s side project with a domain renewal nobody is watching. Chris spent a career reviewing other people’s disaster recovery plans and discovering, gently, that most of them had never actually been tested. So QRLife’s core commitment isn’t a slogan — it’s a written disaster recovery plan for your links, published in public: the 99-Year Promise. If you printed a code on a business card, a menu, a truck door, or a headstone, the code has to still resolve. That constraint drives every technical decision here.

The other half of the résumé is sales — which, for a sales engineer, mostly means booth duty. Twenty-five years of trade show floors, badge scanners, lanyards, and bowls of branded pens. It teaches you exactly one thing worth building a company on: the entire game is getting your contact information into someone’s phone before they walk away. A business card goes into a pocket and dies there. A scan goes into the phone, where it can still be found on Tuesday. QRLife is that lesson, shipped.

QRLife.me is built and operated by Mr Chris Does Stuff LLC, an active Florida limited-liability company (formed July 2024) based in Orlando, Florida — family-owned and family-run. Same person writes the code, answers the support email, and signs the 99-Year Promise.

You may also know the creator channel @MrChrisDoesStuff (tech, projects, drones, RV builds — including an 8U rack in a camper, because a traveling disaster recovery center seemed like a reasonable thing to own). Same Chris. (Not the UK software executive of the same name.)

Links: The 99-Year Promise · About · Trust Center · Chris on LinkedIn · @MrChrisDoesStuff on YouTube