about kellegous.com
This site is my personal site; my name is Kelly Norton. kellegous.com began nameless back in the mid-nineties on an overloaded web server at Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In 2000, it suffered in my self-imposed exile from academia and was relocated to its current address, kellegous.com. Here I traffic in the things that interest me, which is always subject to change.
Down in the engine room, kellegous.com relies heavily on the Ruby on Rails web framework and lightly on PHP, hand-crafted C and other random technologies. It is hosted in some randomly assigned server at Dreamhost and enjoys decent availability thanks to their competence and commitment. Having been hosted there for over three years, I'm now comfortable recommending them to others. If you are interested in signing up for hosting, drop me an email and we can split a referral discount.
disclaimer
Like I said above, this is my personal site. The views you see expressed here are my own. I do not speak for my employer.
about me
Again, my name is Kelly Norton. I am a designer and engineer, which means I apply a little engineering to my design and a little design to my engineering. I've recently relocated back down to Atlanta after spending a couple of years in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My domestic posse completely fills one moderately compact German car and consists of my wife Stephanie and our kids, Trey and Zoe. I work, very happily, for Google. Prior to that, I studied under John Maeda at the MIT Media Lab. And prior to that, I was the Senior Vice President and co-founder of Connexxia, a small technology company that helped colleges and universities maintain meaningful connections with prospective and former students. I grew up in South Georgia, but I'm told I speak with virtually no drawl. I also skate goofy foot, but with much less zeal than I did in my youth.
some events from my life
I'm an engineer at Google working on Google Web Toolkit.
Jul 2006I spent the summer working as part of IBM's Advanced Internet Technology Group creating web applications to demonstrate the power of emerging technologies and concepts that make up the semantic web.
Jun 2006I walked across the stage in Killian court on an overcast day to receive a Masters degree in Media Arts and Sciences. For the previous two years, I was a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab in John Maeda's Physical Language Workshop. There I did work at the intersection of engineering and design, including work in the area of information visualization, infrastructure to support collaborative creative tools and computational art.
May 2006Zoe Miranda Norton was born around 4am on the morning of the 13th a mere twenty minutes after we arrived at the hospital. She weighed about the same as the last package I received through UPS, but did not come packed in bubble wrap.
Aug 2004I was married to Stephanie at the Forsythe Park fountain in one of our favorite cities in the whole world, Savannah, Georgia. We then headed down Bull Street for a more spirited celebration at the River Street Inn. Less than three weeks later, we packed our belongings into a moving van and moved from Atlanta to Cambridge. We still haven't taken a honeymoon.
Jul 2000Connexxia LLC was officially founded in a swank midtown law office with a large window overlooking Piedmont Park. We had already begun to build web-based software and plans for services that would help colleges and universities more effectively recruit high school seniors. Two of the founders, Peter Flur and Shawn Coyne, shared the role of President while I was generally in charge of getting the software written. My title at the time was Vice President of Technology Development. A couple of years later, I became a Senior Vice President. I always found that amusing. That and the fact that there was a time when the company had three employees, all of which had the word “president” in their title. After four very rewarding years of leading a small team of developers, I left in 2004 just months before the company sold to James Tower.
Dec 1999Realizing that I was now spending more time in the library reading modern literature than doing research in intelligent networks, I decided to leave Georgia Tech and take a job writing software for a small technology consulting firm. I did a couple of notable projects there, including much of the design and implementation of a large multilingual auction site selling things like bulldozers and school buses. The site worked, unfortunately the business did not. Turns out that people would rather negotiate the purchase of twenty earth movers over the phone.
Jun 1998For three whole months, my address was 2-3 Rue Marconi, Metz, France 57000.
Jun 1997I graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in Electrical Engineering that was actually more like a degree in Computer Engineering. I started immediately working on a Masters degree that I would never finish.
Sep 1992I drove out of my hometown of Cordele, GA in a little white Cavalier listening to some CD's that I now deny I ever owned. I only managed to move about forty five minutes away to Cochran, GA where I started my college career at Middle Georgia College. A little over a year later, I moved to Atlanta, where I lived almost twelve years.
Feb 1974Born in Albany, GA. I don't recall if it was raining or not.
