I love making stuff.

My pronouns are they/them or she/her.

My name is Katie and I typically go by Kat, itsk8ekat, or KittyKatt online.

If you’re here, you’re probably one of two people:

  • You came from the link on my Github (which you probably found looking at screenFetch or one of the bunches of issues I comment on)
  • You’re a recruiter and got this link from my resume

If you’re the former, welcome! I don’t really work on my original claim to fame (screenFetch) anymore but it was a really fun 10 year journey and helped me learn a LOT. I can confidently say I wouldn’t be where I am today without the valuable skills I learned from that. I have a longer post about screenFetch’s future in the discussions on that Github repository. I do a lot of other stuff now, though! So you should check that stuff out too. That would make me really happy. :)

If you’re the latter, also welcome! Let’s both pretend like this site is full of only the best sounding, million dollar buzzwords. Feels like a great plan to me. If I sent a resume to you, very likely I’d genuinely love to be what you’re looking for. Thank you for being here. Check out the Homelab page for some of the stuff I’ve been working on (and more buzzwords)!

I started out making shell stuff. For a long time, that was pretty much all I did. I learned BASH writing screenFetch and, up until the last decade, solved pretty much all of my problems by over-engineering BASH scripts. Some call me a masochist for this, but whatever. It’s what I knew at the time…but not anymore!

This latest decade of my life, I feel like my skillset and knowledge have exploded. Before that, I wasn’t even thinking of running in-home Kubernetes clusters; I wasn’t thinking about representing my whole infrasture as code. Now, my homelab almost feels like a small business that has no profit but is really fun to show up to every day. I’ve learned a lot of Python and Go and have used that knowledge to write my own Terraform providers and Kubernetes operators. Heck, the things I look at the most nowadays are in YAML! The last decade of my life is the first time I’ve truly felt like I’m actually succeedding and thriving. I feel like I’ve really gotten somewhere and I found what I absolutely love to do.

For now, I’m based in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, where I work as a DevOps Engineer. I’ve lived here for ~25 years and love it. Really got that small-town, big-city feel to it. Not too crowded, not too desolate. Plus, the food is amazing. If you’ve never had St. Louis toasted raviolis or St. Louis style pizza, you’re not really living. However, the next year is likely to result in a large change for me as I’m dead set on moving to Maine.

If you ever wanna chat, you can find me in several places:

  • Various social icons on my home page
  • Matrix: @katie:k8ekat.dev
  • Discord: KittyKatt
  • There used to be some IRC links here but RIP IRC :(