Kai Curtis
Development at Substantial
Meet Kai Curtis, Senior Developer and improv actor extraordinaire.
When we asked Kai to to tell us a bit about himself he said:
“I’ve spent almost 40 years now around computers, my first love being computer games (which is what I have my degree in), but I was seduced away from that world by the instant gratification and low bar to entry of web development, which I’ve made my home for two decades now, on and off, including these last six at Substantial. (Well, the instant gratification and low bar that characterized the web in the late 90s. The times, they have a-changed.)
The thing that sticks with me from my love of games, though, is a penchant for escapism, something that’s taken me into theater over the years, and something that’s influencing where I’m going with computing these days: creative coding. The tools and communities that’ve built up around that are great these days, and I’m hoping that it’s an area where we can take more of the work at Substantial, a company that I think has an artist’s soul to it.”
We also asked Kai, “What would be a dream project?”
“For all of the kicks that I get out of the day-to-day problem solving and collaboration that are part and parcel of working at Substantial, I think there’d be additional harmonies that’d come out of getting to work on things like interactive installations. We may never be a full blown digital artist’s co-op, but if we could be equally facile at the end of the day in creating either highly scalable distributed applications or lovingly crafted digital sandboxes to inspire curiosity and play, I would call it a win. And who knows — maybe those two aren’t as different from each other as they might seem?”
