User:Ken Owen

Ken was educated in classical languages (BA Harvard) and business (MBA Rensselaer) and started his business career in marketing. Some of his market analysis and research was published including a prescient look at the crumb rubber market in 1998. With the advent of the PC he saw the great potential of the computer in business, and started programming.

Starting with C and Dbase in the early 1980's, Ken was a self-taught programmer driven by business needs. When DBase went the way of the dinosaur, he wrote database applications first on Microsoft Access then later on PostgreSQL and MySQL. With the introduction of the World Wide Web in the early 90's he added Perl, first just for CGI and later for server scripting, and Java for applications. Since then, PHP, Javascript and object oriented frameworks (especially Zend, Catalyst, and Spring with Hibernate) are in the skill set.

With the advent of Linux and Open Source, the software environment started changing in exciting ways. He is a contributor to several open source projects and keeps current on changes to major open source initiatives.

Using his business knowledge and by keeping up with new technologies he is able to provide clients with innovative secure web applications, database design and management, and open source programming services.