About — evomedia.net

Up front

I have a C4 spinal cord injury and I use a power wheelchair. I am saying it here, on the site, so that the first time we are on a video call neither of us has to spend the first ten minutes on it. You will see the chair, and I would be happy to answer any questions.

Kelly Michels on the open deck of a cruise ship in a power wheelchair, smiling, sea and cloud behind him — You will see the chair.

How I work

I type one key at a time with a mouthstick and point with a trackball. Everything on this site — the products, the test suites, the infrastructure — was built that way.

It is not a new way of working, and it is not a lighter one. It is how I have worked my whole career: twenty years at Autodesk, and everything before that, normally on eight- to ten-hour days.

It is also why I direct AI rather than type everything myself. When every keystroke costs something you get very precise about saying what you mean, and very strict about checking what comes back. That turns out to be most of the job in QA, and it is the discipline the QA case study and the nightly test results are built on.

Before

Before the injury I rode BMX vert, touring for Haro on a trick team across Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana — the sport that became the X-Games, back when nobody had said “extreme athlete” yet. I was quite good at it.

The Haro Invert hanging above my desk is the bike I built for exactly how I rode. It was locked up the day of the fall and I was on a stock bike instead, which is most likely why. I build software the same way now: for exactly how I work.

Kelly high above a vert ramp, tucked on the bike, the bike’s shadow on the ramp face below and the crowd along the fence — Look-Back trick off the 8ft quarter pipe.

The computer, and the company

Two years after the injury I was given a computer. I was in college for psychology at the time, and the computer became the direction instead: I left, taught myself, and gambled on going it alone. A few years later I started my own company — evomedia.net — building websites, animation and software for clients from local businesses to MGM Interactive, Time Warner and Mattel. It was the right call.

Then twenty years at Autodesk as Principal QA Engineer on Maya and 3ds Max, doing this job with this injury — the Autodesk work. This year I resurrected evomedia.net, and since April I have been doing it for myself again: the products, the AI platform behind them, and the infrastructure under all of it. None of it has to be taken on faith; it is all reachable from here.

Two products that exist because of it

I enjoy photography, and recently I have been doing astrophotography. The Canon software is not great for people with physical disabilities, and my equatorial star tracker needed a way to find Polaris. So I just built what I needed — evo.ablecamera and evo.polaris — and I am open-sourcing both for the community.

The whole story

How it happened, in short, with the photographs from that day.

What I am looking for

A Senior SDET / Principal QA Engineer role — AI systems, test automation, CI/CD quality gates. The résumé is judged on the work, which is how I want it; this page is here so the first conversation can be too. Get in touch.