Friday, December 29, 2017

God Bless Ken Walker - Senior Developer for MEMEX


These are the blog posts that I find great difficulty in writing. I found out yesterday that Ken Walker had passed away on December 20th.

Ken was always a true professional and a great man.

I knew Ken because he was the contractor for MEMEX who led the development of the first version MERLIN - MEMEX's shop floor monitoring software, where I was the CTO responsible for software and hardware development.  Without Ken, there would not have been a version of MERLIN.  I heard countless stories of Ken putting in many long, long hours to get MEMEX software products out the door.  When I started working with Ken in 2014, I was blessed to have such a dedicated and talented software developer.

We had daily update calls and Ken would usually be the one to make all of us laugh.  Ken was up for any challenge, but was always able to do it with a sense of humor.

My fondest memories of Ken are when I would drive out to his house in Woodstock, Ontario where we would go to one of his favorite restaurants and just sit and talk.  Yes, we would discuss work, but we would usually discuss life.  What truly amazed me about Ken was his ability to keep working under the most trying of conditions, and Ken never complained. 

When I saw the post by Wally Cassell of MEMEX on the guest book for Ken, that Wally and Jeremy Roy of MEMEX visited Ken in the past few weeks and shared some stories, as well as some laughs that warmed my heart because I am sure Ken greatly appreciated their visit.  

My thoughts and prayers are with Ken's wife Maureen and his entire family, relatives and friends. 

God bless you Ken - you were the ultimate class act and you will be terribly missed by of all of those who you touched.