Kevin: My Journey to Babylon
Hi Babylon Community!
My name is Kevin Brown, and I’m super excited to have recently joined the amazing Babylon team! As I’m settling in and joining more discussions on the forum, I wanted to take this chance to introduce myself to all of you.
My Path So Far…
I joined Microsoft a little more than 20 years ago and, as you’d imagine, during that time I’ve worked on a wide variety of projects.
I started working on Exchange Server, on UI for administrators to more easily configure new domains and then on the user facing UI of Outlook Web Access.
Later I decided to join the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) where I got to dive deep into how attackers would exploit security issues and how to defend against them. When Windows Phone 7 came out, I was inspired by its UI and moved over there to work on the Photos and Camera apps and underlying services that gave camera access to all apps.
My work eventually evolved into the Video Editor that was part of the Photos app in Windows 10. From there I moved into the Microsoft Stream team, where I worked until just recently on building a feature-rich and performant web-based video player for Microsoft 365.
And Now, Babylon!
My interest in graphics goes way back to my early days of coding. My earliest programs were text-based (the earliest program I remember writing was a horse racing game that used &s to represent the horses!). Later in high school I started scratching the surface of graphics, writing an animated flame effect using a pixel blurring approach (inspired by Winamp visualizers and probably written in Pascal!), and then learning DirectX so I could write a Tetris-like game (the rule of the computer lab was no games — unless you wrote them 😊).
Throughout my career I’ve had opportunities to dive deep into areas that I’d long be interested in but hadn’t been able to explore much yet, like my security work in the MSRC. Now I’m thrilled to go deep into another one of those areas — graphics — on an amazing team with an outstanding culture, and to be a part of this fabulous community!
What’s Next
Given my recent focus on web-based video, my first project is looking into how we can use Babylon (and the GPU) to make video more engaging, personalized, and even interactive. I’m looking forward to sharing more with all of you in the future! I’m also the new owner of the input system for Babylon, so feel free to tag me in the forum (@amoebachant) for anything input related.
I’m having a blast diving into this awesome tech, looking forward to seeing you all on the forum, and want to thank all of you for making this such a fantastic community!
Thanks!
-Kevin Brown
Wait, AmoebaChant?
P.S. You may be wondering, what does AmoebaChant mean? One of the highlights of my teen years was running a Wildcat! BBS in the 90s, where I had a ton of fun building ANSI graphics and animations.
I wanted to pick a name for the board that would be near the top of the alphabetized BBS lists, not be too specific about what the board focused on, and odd enough to catch the eye, and so the name AmoebaChant was born!
