Senior Technical Writer and Programmer
Ken studied English/American Literature at school a long, long time ago. He cleverly leveraged his hard-won education into a low-level admin position at a defense industry plant, where he encountered Mr. UNIX, Mr. C, and Mr. Bourne-Shell. After being told by an aerospace engineer at the plant that "programming is a trivial art," Ken studied a bit more and became a UNIX/C programmer. This was back in the days when programming computers was at least as much art as science.
Ken focused on RDBMS applications, specializing so much so that by late 1999 he had painted himself into a technical corner. It was time to re-tool. Adroitly missing the entire Dot Com boom and following a deep-rooted desire to return to the written word, he "switched careers" to technical writing in the year 2000. This naturally led to learning more programming languages (Java, C++, Perl, Python) and many things Web-related (ASP, JSP, J2EE, HTTP, HTML, XML), and also involved some technical writing (system administration guides, implementation guides, customization guides, user help guides, API docs). He wrote most of these using FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and of course the vi editor, which is undoubtedly still the best text editor.
Since coming to work for Expert Support, Ken has worked on a variety of projects from software services to hardware design to animation. Although he is now a Senior Technical Writer, he feels that there is much more to learn and so he tries to maintain a "beginner's mind." As they say, a glass that is half-empty can receive more water. So why not keep it three-fourths empty? Indeed.
While not focused on work, Ken occasionally imagines that he might write a moderately funny novel one of these days, but in the meantime there are many books to be read, many films to be seen, and many miles to be run.
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