Ken Walker

Background

About Ken Walker

Ken Walker recently retired end of May, 2020. Ready to start hacking more personal projects and small IoT hardware. Ken finished his formal career at First Derivatives PLC, an Irish company, leading the Web UI for the Control for Kx platform. Ken was with the local Ottawa eCommerce company Shopify from 2014 thru 2016, working on the Storefront editor, Purchase order feature and Ruby on Rails optimization. Previously, Ken was the co-lead of the Open Sourced Orion Project and the Web IDE lead for the JazzHub SaaS offering from IBM. Ken had done many talks on Orion at Jfokus, EclipseCon (North America and Europe), at MLOC.JS Budapest, Øredev Sweden, JAXConf US, OSCON, QCON Sao Paulo, 33Degree Krakow plus several cross IBM Canada lab TechTalks. Previous to Orion, Ken was the Manager of the J9 Embedded Java Class Libraries team at IBM where he developed Virtual Machines and clean-room Class libraries for a wide range of devices including mobile phones, set top boxes, entertainment consoles and telematics. The J9 implementation is now available at Eclipse. Previous these libraries were open sourced at Apache, picked up by Google and thus are were on every Android device. He literally knows that java.lang.Object is the root of all Evil. He is the Specification Lead for JSR-075 and was on the expert group for JSR-195. He has done numerous JavaOne and EclipseCon presentations, Oredev as well as Embedded Conference talks. Previous projects include team leader roles for VisualAge for Smalltalk and the UI implementation of VisualAge for Java. He was with Object Technology International starting in 1992 which was aquired by IBM. There he was engaged in Envy/Smalltalk, CommonWidgets/CommonGraphics for Smalltalk and User Interface design of the original VisualAge for Java. He used to make $10 a program in 1980 writing educational software for the Regina Board of Education’s Commodore PETs