Kason McEwen

I was born in 1987, and computers were part of the atmosphere of my childhood. My mom was a programmer, and she was one of the lead programmers on the original version of Midnight Rescue. So I grew up with this very normal-seeming idea that computers could be playful, visual, and useful for learning.

I loved a bunch of classic DOS games in my early childhood: Rocky's Boots, Frogger, Kid Pix, Snake, Midnight Rescue, Pac-Man, Captain Comic, Digger, Alley Cat, and Battle Chess. Later, in later childhood and my early teenage years, my brothers and I played whatever random games we could find at the dollar store, including shareware games like Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure. A lot of those games were strange, visual, playful, and memorable in ways that stuck with me.

I had an active imagination and always thought it would be fun to build my own worlds. In Jr. High I made little websites in Dreamweaver. In high school my older brother gifted me an Adobe suite with Flash for Christmas, and that is when I first really started coding games.

Some of my first projects were exactly the kinds of things you would expect from a teenage kid having fun with Flash: a little stick-figure platformer with arrow-key controls, spike stompers that came down from the ceiling, and Metallica music because that happened to be in my brother's Apple library. I also made a buggy Pac-Man clone where you could eat through the walls if you toggled fast enough, and later a Sudoku solver I made after my wisdom teeth were removed because a friend gave me a packet of puzzles and I decided it would be more fun to program the solution.

After serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Ghana and Alabama, I worked at BYU Independent Study and built educational games for university courses. Instructors would bring the content and I would build reusable Flash templates driven by XML. Some of the work was practical, some of it was playful, and I loved the feeling of turning learning material into something interactive.

Later, while I was taking a bioinformatics course, I built an Evolutionary Biology app for iOS. It started as a school project, but it ended up reaching more than 50K App Store units and even generated a few thousand dollars. Then my wife, who is Chinese, helped spark my interest in Mandarin, and I built Chineasily because I wanted language learning to feel more visual and game-like.

Then I spent 11 years at Amazon learning a very different side of software: distributed systems, operational excellence, CI/CD, observability, controlled rollouts, metrics, latency, reliability, and simplification at massive scale. That experience changed how I think about building products. I still care about imagination and learning, but I also care about whether the system can survive contact with real users.

CourseNinja is where those threads meet. It is games, education, Mandarin learning, science apps, marketplace-scale engineering, backend systems, and the new creative leverage of AI all colliding in a way that feels very natural to me. I am having a blast building it.