Hello World.

I’m K Mills.. I consider myself a creative technologist and asipiring farmer :)

I have been building software for over 20 years, starting around 1999 when I learned Flash and began building websites, animations and such. Prior to making this leap to Flash, I was a graphic designer and video editor. I also dabbled in motion graphics back then, but really didn’t care for the amount of time required to do such work. Sometimes you’d need to wait for hours to render out a few seconds only to need to make a change and start the render all over. This was a major time suck.

Web Designer? not me!

When I discovered Flash, I had recently had the nightmarish experience of building a non-trivial website in HTML. This is 1998 and unless you knew how to write HTML by hand, the tools (especially for macOS 8) were rare. There was a tool by Adobe called PageMill which would run on my system. It was a simple code editor that featured syntax highlighting and not too much more. At the time I had no plans to ever enter the world of software development, and after the terrible experience building first website for a client, I didn’t want anything to do with web design either. I retreated to my safe place: Photoshop and focused on designing. Then I happened to come across a flash-based site that offered a very rich experience. there were sounds, animation, interactivity and it looked nothing like the boxy HTML i’d struggled with for previous months. I had to know what this was, so as usual I attempted to view the page source, but instead was presented with an “About Flash” context menu.

I opened the “About Flash” link to the Flash Player product page and started my research into what this Flash thing was. Back then it was still owned by Macromedia and offered a 30 day trial. I downloaded the trial version and for the next 30 days I spent almost every free moment I had digging into this animation tool. It’s user interface was familiar as I’d had been using Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and such programs. After getting a handle on basics it was clear this tool was going to enable me to do even more. At the time I primarily illustrated vector art that I would animate. Eventually I’d explore creating interactivity options and by the end of the 30 days, I learned enough to justify buying a license and starting to create content for clients.

Animator to Coder

… TBD

Coder to Engineer

… TBD

Engineer to Architect

… TBD

Back to Animator

… TBD