Ken Bannister

Ken Bannister has held a variety of roles in software development since 1992. Ken began as a self-employed developer, creating an application development tool written in Smalltalk/V for an accounting software company and implementing an interface to a reports engine for a bank. In 1994, Ken joined Kensoft as a Senior Developer, developing a data generation testing tool in Java in an S/390 mainframe environment, as well as several products with Smalltalk/V. In 1999, they became a Senior Developer at iMind Education Systems, developing a J2EE and XML based server for grade school educational content and leading server-side development of the company's award-winning Internet based education portal web site. In 2001, they became a Senior Developer at iBuilding, developing a J2EE and XML based application server for commercial real estate management and introducing the use of XSLT for document printing. Later that year, they became a Developer at Get2Hawaii, developing several projects to provide important functionality for a SOAP-based application server for air and car travel reservations. In 2002, they became a Developer at Mobile Pioneer, porting a J2ME wireless chess game to C++ on Palm OS and developing a custom request-response protocol on top of TCP/IP sockets library. In 2009, Ken became a Principal Engineer at Onset Data Loggers, serving as a technical leader for software development and overseeing implementations mostly in Java, with servers on AWS. In 2016, they became an Author/Maintainer of gcoap/nanocoap for RIOT OS, developing an open source, embedded C CoAP library and acting as a maintainer for popular RIOT OS. In 2020, Ken began working on Independent Projects as a Developer, focusing on smaller open source development projects to explore new domains. Finally, in 2021, they became a Backend Engineer at balena.

Ken Bannister completed a Bachelor of Science in Botany from North Carolina State University between 1978 and 1982. Ken then studied Computer Science at Cal State - East Bay and San Francisco State between 2004 and 2005. Ken then went on to earn a Master of Science in Computer Science from Arizona State University between 2005 and 2009.