Keith E. Curtis earned a BSEE from Montana State University. Following graduation, he was employed by Tele-Tech Corporation as a design and project engineer, and also began consulting part-time as an embedded engineer. He was then employed by Bally Gaming in Las Vegas as an engineer and later the electronics engineering manager, working for various Nevada gaming companies in both design and management. In 2000 he began work as a Principal Application Engineer for Microchip, where he is still employed.He has written a number of articles and regularly gives a popular course on multitasking firmware design at the Embedded Systems Conference.