A few days ago, my mate Kenneth Doyle passed away and I’ve been trying to write this since then, and every draft has felt too small for the man it’s about.
I met Ken back in 2003 and as soon as we met I knew it wasn’t one of those slow-build friendships. It was more like running into someone you already knew, an old friend you’d somehow lost track of and just found again.
Over time, he became my mentor in all things IT, web development and online marketing, though “mentor” undersells what he actually did. There’s a very direct line between the conversations I had with Ken back then and my web design business ZenWeb existing at all.
If he hadn’t taken the time to show me how all the pieces fit together, I don’t think ZenWeb would exist today. Plenty of people can teach you a skill but Ken taught me a way of thinking.
What made him such a good teacher was that he wasn’t only technical. Ken was one of the most creative people I’ve known: a writer, a drummer and percussionist, and a genuine thinker who turned ideas over properly instead of settling for the easy answer.
Ken was funny in a way that suited me down to a tee.
He was very quirky, a bit sideways, the kind of humour where a conversation would start on one topic and end up somewhere nobody could have predicted twenty minutes earlier, both of us laughing so hard neither of us could get a sentence out properly.
Those conversations are some of my favourite memories of him. Nothing was ever off limits, and nothing stayed on topic for long, and that was exactly the point.
Underneath the humour though, Ken had a very high moral compass. He cared about fairness and social justice in a way that was real, and that was something I admired a lot.
It showed in the way he treated people, in the causes he cared about, and also in his work as an IELTS tutor.
He wasn’t just teaching people to pass an English test. He genuinely wanted to make a difference in the lives of his students. That mattered to him as much as anything else he did.
As a friend, Ken was fiercely loyal. Ken would do anything for a mate, and he made you feel like that loyalty came with no strings attached. That’s rarer than it should be.
Ken was also a very spiritual man, in a way that gave everything else about him a kind of grounding. The creativity, the humour, the moral compass, all of it seemed to come from somewhere deeper than just personality. He’d actually thought about things.
I’ve lost a few people close to me this year, and I keep focusing on the same thought: how much the good ones actually matter while they’re here, and how rarely we say that out loud until they’re gone.
So, I’m saying it now… In losing Kenneth, we lost one of the good guys.
It was an honour and privilege to have known him for over twenty years and luckier still that he decided to teach me things nobody was paying him to teach.
It’s safe to say that a fair amount of who I am now, professionally and otherwise, is all because of him.
Rest easy, Ken. I’m missing you already,
Corey
