A few memories of Kevin Gray
Like others, I’m tremendously sad to hear of the sudden passing of Kevin Gray, a software engineer at Very Good Ventures.
Kevin and I first met when a couple of us went over to Manhattan to film a video case study for Hamilton. That he didn’t appear in the case study itself was testament to his naturally self-effacing nature. He was happy for others to be in the spotlight, but was central behind the scenes.
It’s been my good fortune in my professional career to collaborate with developers who are comfortable working with unfinished products, who are unfazed by their limitations, bugs or lack of documentation, and just have an uncanny instinct for finding the things that actually work and building on them. Kevin was one of those kinds of special people.
A huge percentage of the amazing Flutter demos that helped people fall in love with our product came from Kevin.
Kevin built the first desktop app with Flutter to be publicly demoed.
Kevin built the first web app with Flutter to be publicly demoed.
I remember some late nights with David and him in the run up to the Flutter 1.0 launch, as we showed off an early proof of concept demo of desktop support. Kevin had built a presentation app from scratch for the launch, using Flutter to present Flutter. It was genius, crazy, and high-risk. But we were in good hands with Kevin, who pulled a number of crazy ideas out of thin air and implemented them with our less-than-half-baked product in hours as late as the day of the launch.
He was humble, smart, dryly humorous, and gentle. I didn’t know him nearly as well as I would have liked to, but I do know that the world and the Flutter community at large is less without him.
So long, Kevin. On behalf of Flutter, we will miss you.
