My name is Sean Kelly. I’m almost 40 and I have been programming professionally (as in drawing a paycheck) since I was 16.
In highschool I worked for Construction Management Software back when it was just a few guys in a garage. Although I learned to program on an Apple//e, my main machine at home was an Amiga 1000. In community college I did various side jobs programming mostly for private parties, but occasionally I had a big client like Allenbach Industries, where I designed weak bit copy protection for the then brand new Apple//gs.
It was at this point that God really got my attention. I had drastically underbid the project because I thought it would be easy and as the days and hours dragged on I started bargaining with God.
“OK, God, make it work and I’ll be good.”
“Make it work and I’ll read the bible everyday.”
“Make it work, and I’ll never ask for anything again in my life.”
“Make it work and I’ll go the church on Sunday.”
Success! It worked. Oh crap. I really felt like God had called my bluff and I didn’t want to risk not keeping a bargain with God so the next Sunday I dressed up and went to a big non-denominational church. I was amazed to see people I had known years earlier there. In retrospect, had I known God better it wouldn’t have been such a big surprise. It was at this mega church that I met my future wife, Lisa. As a geek, helping with the technical part of a Sunday service seemed like a natural way to apply my talents. Tony was the soundman and so I learned the ins and outs of running a sound board from him. Lisa was his younger sister.
After community college, I transfered to UCSD and settled into my first full time programming job at SalePoint programming cash register point of sale systems. I remember that Egghead Software (back when they actually had stores) and Universal Studio’s Florida where our big clients. From there I stepped over to PriceClub doing the same thing in their IT department programming cash registers and various EDP (I can’t remember what that stands for) applications for their warehouses. Though I loved SalePoint, PriceClub had benefits and I was planning to marry Lisa by then.
After graduating from UCSD with a bachelors in Math/Computer Science and getting married (yes, I waited until I graduated), I took a government job at the Imperial Irrigation District in the Water Department. It was at this point that I bought my first IBM PC compatible and started to learn C++ and Windows programming. While living in Brawley, CA we attended the biggest Baptist church in town, almost 300 people and I naturally got involved helping with the sound engineering. The I met a fantastic man, Ken. He was almost as old as my dad and had grown children just a little younger than me. We both worked at IID and would get together regularly during work for lunch or just a coffee break. We also would get together early in the morning to exercise. We’d study the bible and pray often. He was a strict King James only kind of guy and I remember explaining to my wife that I would rather fail on the side of being too conservative than too liberal. This was really the first taste I had ever had of kingdom living. Daily in each others lives, applying what the bible said to everyday life. Toward the end of our stint in the desert, we even started attending the same conservative Southern Baptist church that he was a deacon of. I remember my wife feeling uncomfortable that she was the only lady in that church who didn’t wear a dress on Sunday. I also remember the Pastor telling me that while he liked me and everything, he’d never let me read scripture from the pulpit from an NASB bible. Still my friendship with Ken was worth all the silliness.
Shortly after that, we moved back to San Deigo to work for Intuit writing TurboTax for Windows. I still have good friends that work there. Though we lived in La Jolla, close to work, we still trekked up to North County every Sunday to go to our old home church.
Finally in May of 1994, I came to work for Microsoft. Initially, I worked on the AFX team doing MFC. We purchased our very first home just 4.9 miles from “main campus” and started attending the little Baptist church just a few blocks from home. We got involved with working with the youth group there, teaching Sunday school and hosting various youth activities.
The Visual Studio team was growing and split into three teams. Enterprise, Pro and Student. I went with the Student team with the hopes of building a version of Visual Studio that would meet the needs of students and hobbiests. Lisa’s folks relocated up here to be close to their first grandchild and subsequently, my brother moved up also. In 1996 our first baby, Micah, was born. In 1997, Bill Gates turned the company on the internet. The Student Edition team, along with the Fortran and Cobol teams were “freed” to form what became the Visual J++ team. I jumped ship and went back to the Visual Studio Pro team to work on making VBScript the macro language for the IDE. Lisa got involved in helping with Awana at our church.
After Visual Studio 5.0 shipped I moved over to do development tools for WindowsCE. This was where I met Jim Cash (J$) and learned what it took to be a professional Visual Basic programmer while we worked together on what became VBCE. Most people with a computer science degree don’t think that you can be a professional Visual Basic programmer (”It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” - E. Dijkstra). It was at this time that I became more involved at church. I took responsibilities for communication with our missionaries as missions secretary, I also was elected to the deacon board, and I started helping with sound. Our second baby, Hannah was born in 1998. Then, my brother married the Pastor’s youngest daughter and all was right with the world.
Then our Pastor left for another church and we began searching for a replacement. I joined the Pulpit committee and eventually chaired it before we found a Pastor. I suppose I should be thankful that I got to see and experience the business end of the traditional church system. Shortly after that I moved over the the Windows team to doing Printing & Imaging UI and Micah, who was 4 and a half by then was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Microsoft gave me all the time off I needed and we started picking up the pieces. There is a lot to learn to take care of a diabetic. Thankfully, with the increase in nutritional awareness thanks to fads like the Atkins Diet there is a lot of information out there to help out. Our third baby, Abigail was born later that year. After shipping WindowsXP out the door (I worked on the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer), I set to work redesigning the scripting lbirary for WIA. From my experience doing VBCE I knew what a VB programmer expected in a well desgined COM Automation library and put together what came to be known as WIAAut. It was right around this time that we started homeschooling Micah. His diabetes ended up being the lynch pin that pushed us into it. We had considered it previously, but after talking to other parents of diabetics, whose HBA1Cs were sky high because they went to public school, we decided to look into homeschooling more seriously.
Because of WIAAut, everyone forgot I was a UI programmer when the team exploded. Most of my team-mates were sent packing to go work on the Picture It team. We still get together every week for Sushi. (it turned my stomach at first too) Because everyone thought of me as an API programmer, I was put with an incubation project to develop the next portable device connectivity solution. It was working with Micah’s blood glucose meters and the possibility of making connectivity for these types of devices built into Windows that has kept me excited. The incubation team was eventually folded into the Windows Media Player team were I worked on both Windows Media Connect and Windows Portable Devices.
A little over three years ago, I was invited to a Christian believers conference over Labor day weekend. Because we hadn’t seen the friends that invited us in a long time we grateful accepted. While there I saw and experienced something I’d never seen before…. (more later)
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