Started at the bottom. Still building.
I’m Ken Key — a self-taught software engineer from Long Island who turned relentless curiosity into a craft, a company, and a calling. I build for the people the tech world overlooks: the mom-and-pop shops that deserve a world-class website, the businesses scaling toward enterprise, and the developers coming up the way I did.
The long way up.
Nobody handed me a stack. I started at a drafting table, fascinated by how things are built — how a structure holds itself up, how form follows the job it has to do. That curiosity moved to hardware, taking machines apart to understand why they worked, and then to code, because code was the one place where I could design and build with nothing between an idea and the thing itself. No degree from the right school, no connections, no safety net. Just a stubborn refusal to accept that anything was beyond me, and the willingness to out-work what I didn’t yet know.
So I taught myself — late nights, hard problems, one solved bug at a time. A computer teacher. Then a full-stack developer. Then a senior engineer at a market-research firm building data systems where correctness and scale actually mattered. Then independent: open-source software and WordPress plugins now running on thousands of live sites around the world. And today, the founder of KeyInventions — a software company building honest alternatives in markets the incumbents broke.
Fifteen years of proving, quietly, that the only real limit is how long you’re willing to stay with the problem.
Started from the bottom. Now I’m here —
and I remember every step.
That’s exactly why I build the way I do. I work with mom-and-pop shops on Long Island and with companies scaling toward enterprise, and I give both the same thing: the caliber of website, software, and search the giants pay fortunes for — built by someone who genuinely cares how it turns out. I build for developers too, through the job board and the writing, because someone betting on the next person coming up is how I got here. Your win is the whole point.
Fifteen years, one through-line.
Founder & Independent Engineer
Founder of KeyInventions. Open-source and WordPress plugin developer, building products and client work across the full stack.
Senior Software Engineer · Market Resource Partners
Engineering for a market-research and analytics company — data-heavy systems where correctness and scale mattered.
Full-Stack Developer · Enter: Marketing
Where development met marketing — building sites and tools that had to perform commercially, not just technically.
Computer Teacher · Upper Room Christian School
Teaching the fundamentals. It’s still how I think about good software: if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it yet.
What I build with
A working command of the stack, top to bottom — chosen by what the job needs, not by fashion.
- JavaScript & Node.js — apps, APIs, tooling
- PHP & WordPress — sites, themes, custom plugins
- HTML & CSS — accessible, hand-built front-ends
- SQL — data modeling and performance
- Swift — native iOS work
- Python & Java — when the problem calls for them
What keeps me grounded.
I’m lucky enough to do this alongside my wife — she’s my partner at Lead Marketing Strategies, our Long Island marketing agency. It means the businesses we work with get strategy, design, and engineering from one family that actually cares how their story turns out, not a faceless vendor.
Most of all, I’m a dad to four kids — they’re the reason I aim higher, and the standard I hold every late night to. When I’m not building, you’ll find me with my family or in the gym. And honestly? Coding is a hobby as much as it’s the work. I just love to make things.
The mission is simple. And enormous.
Build the best apps and products in the world — and bring Long Island along for it.
KeyInventions is the future I’m building toward: a software company shipping honest, beautifully made products across the markets the incumbents got lazy in. I learned from the people who treated technology as craft, not commodity — Steve Jobs, for the conviction that taste and engineering aren’t opposites; Bill Gates, for proof that a kid with a keyboard could reshape an industry; Mark Zuckerberg, for the reminder that you don’t need permission, or age, to build something that matters.
The lesson I keep from all of them is the one I come back to every day: do fewer things, do them properly, and make what’s left feel inevitable. That’s the work. That’s the whole thing.