KK3050 Kyle Waters

1991 — now

The long way round.

A working life, in the order it actually happened. The skills sit with it, because the jobs and the person are the same story.

  1. August 1991

    Born

    Arrived with no release notes.

  2. August 2001

    First decade

    Ten years shipped. The five-year plan was still missing, and the hands were already ahead of it.

  3. 2002 · age 11

    Original Xbox

    Broke it, opened it to fix it, and broke it more thoroughly. The method has been refined. The instinct has not.

  4. Early teens

    Command & Conquer

    Mods for the series. The first time code did something a shop could not sell.

  5. 2006 — 2016

    Southwest Precision Print

    An apprenticeship from fifteen to senior tradesman. Qualified print machinist, with graphic design and colour theory learned where a mistake is loud and expensive.

  6. 2008 — 2019

    Ropes, and a trawler

    Master ropesman in the family net business, ages 17 to 28, plus time on a Shark Bay trawler. Knots, loads, and weather. Distributed systems, made of rope.

  7. About 2010

    The plywood MakerBot

    Hand-assembled one of the first DIY kits, then a Replicator, then Creality and Bambu Lab. Still printing.

  8. About 2010 — 2012

    Early Minecraft servers

    Server work from when the game was still a jar file and a strong opinion.

  9. 2013 — 2018

    Gamers Paradise

    An internet café and electronics shop. Technician, then assistant manager. Board-level repair, reflow, SMT, console work, and the PC fleet. Ran the weekend days, and took the regulars seriously, including the kids who needed a place that did.

  10. 2013 — 2016

    Xcape at the Cape

    A Visual Basic ticketing system for multi-day entry: ID photo, barcode, come back tomorrow. Their WordPress site was broken, so it became HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.

  11. Through those years

    Freelance sites

    About twelve client sites. Several had a real PHP back end, not a theme with the serial numbers filed off.

  12. About 2½ years

    Safe and Shore Security

    Shopping-centre security, alongside the freelance IT. The exact years are still in a notebook. The licence is not.

  13. After the shop

    Apps and games

    Published on the App Store. In Unity: ShapeDefence, a tower defence game, and a server-farm tycoon.

  14. 2020 — 2024

    Gloflow

    Persistence-of-vision LED flow toys. Prototypes from 2020, a proper start around 2023, then the 2024 festival season. Custom boards, wireless sync, an 8-bit bootloader through to 32-bit firmware, four firmware versions, a custom image codec, a LoRA that prepares pictures for the LEDs, a phone app, a Windows USB tool, and a cloud API with load balancing.

  15. Alongside that

    Small boards

    ESP32, Raspberry Pi Pico, and Core Electronics kits. One of them is a programmable LED-matrix Christmas ornament, which is a serious object for three weeks a year.

  16. 2024 — present

    IT systems

    The day job is business systems people actually finish using. OCR for forms, a 6am report that has behaved for a year, a safety leaderboard for a statewide mining company, a CRM and form builder for a financial firm, a fixer for medical data imports, and an internal phishing-awareness exercise.

  17. Weekends

    Fleet Telemetry

    Windows event codes mapped to severity, sent to one API, with a warning before a PC falls over.

  18. Weekends

    AI Spell Checker

    Built from a long argument with spelling. The sentence matters more than the test.

  19. Weekends

    Access Manager

    An encrypted vault for agent credentials. Secrets stay in SQLite and are handed to the process. The agent does not get to read them.

  20. Weekends

    Memory K

    Context, on demand, for Cursor and Claude Code. Load what the task needs. Summarise the rest.

  21. Now

    kk3050.dev

    You are looking at it.