Next month will be Keystroke's 29th anniversary, and a big part of our history includes a gentleman named Jason Chin.

For those unfamiliar with Jason, he first joined Keystroke in May of 1999 as a computer technician, and his considerable expertise immediately elevated our small company. Over the next decade, Jason expanded into web and software development and used those skills to help transition this business from a simple computer company to a bonafide technology provider. His skills allowed us to grow into web development, web hosting, and email management, as well as LAN and WAN service, which provided us the foundation to later expand into CRM. This relationship continued for a decade, during which time we saw him get married and start a family.

In 2009 Jason decided to leave Keystroke and embark on new challenges in software development. This journey involved some pretty exciting projects over the last 14 years, and I enjoyed hearing about them as we reconnected last December.

In January we got together for dinner and started discussing the possibility of contracting out some work to him on an overflow basis. The plan was for him to participate in our dev meetings, and learn some of the tricks of the trade that are unique to the Act! world, like SDK and API development. That was the plan anyway, but a funny thing happened during this process. As Jason acclimated to this new world, he began to feel at home again with his new development peers - perhaps more than either of us expected. It wasn't long before the conversations changed from him being a subcontractor to him joining us full-time again as a developer. Well, I'm delighted to announce that these talks concluded successfully, and he started with us full-time on February 1st.

In the last three decades of running this business, I cannot recall any cases of someone doing a 10-year tour of duty with a company, leaving for 14 years, and then returning. When we first worked together in the late 90s and 2000s, he was the most technical person on a 3-person team, and now he returns to join a very different team of thirty, with a rich variety of expertise. I know our CTO is excited to offload some of his responsibilities to Jason, as many of the things he currently manages, like our email server, Jason first set up twenty years ago.

It's frankly as much fun to tell this story, as it is to welcome Jason back. We've both lived a lot of life in the interim, we're older, and our kids have all grown to become teenagers. It's amazing and heart-warming to think Keystroke is now stronger for going back to the future, but I know we are.

Here is a picture of our humble team back in the late 90s. All three of us, James Paulus, myself, and Jason Chin are back together again.