Hi! My name is Kat.
The first code I wrote was Tumblr themes, circa sixth grade, then bioinformatics scripts and hackathon projects soon after. Just before starting college at MIT, I wrote a cold email that flew me to San Francisco (from my home state of Massachusetts) to intern at Replit.
Since then, I’ve worked at Primer, Cohere AI, and Gatsby and participated in a self-directed educational retreat for programmers at the Recurse Center. Within MIT, I’ve developed websites with teams at the Visualization Group in CSAIL, the Senseable City Lab, and music department. Starting summer 2023, I’ll be a full-time software engineer at Fractional in NYC.
I’m always happy to chat with people! You can find me on Twitter. I’m also on GitHub and LinkedIn.
Among the projects I’ve created over the years, here are some of my favorite, in an order which is probably particular albeit inarticulable:
Out of IPs (source): Interactive explainer about IP addresses, featured in the Idyll gallery
wen (source): It’d be infeasible to make a full-fledged Chinese font based on my Chinese calligraphy, so I did the next best thing, to emulate such a font (fun video about the project)
recreation (repo): I livestreamed myself (in March 2020, of all times) visually replicating a website in HTML and CSS without previewing the result until the end and without “inspect element”
Point Theme (40 forks on GitHub): By popular demand, I made a Jekyll theme based on a previous version of my personal website
factory factory (source): I made a website that displayed random synonymous variations of “weird flex but okay” (e.g. “strange brag yet acceptable”) (in the most naïve way possible). Then, I added on a UI to let users to customize the phrase and synonyms
Diatonic Rulers (source): Interactive website that lets users understand music theory more deeply by exploring relationships among pitch, scale degrees and positions, and intervals
I love conversation and reflection, and some of the more structured venues through which I’ve been able to scratch that itch are MIT’s interfaith dialogue club and becoming a peer educator on healthy relationships.
I sometimes dance, I sometimes do YouTube yoga, and I sometimes do reasonable-looking things at the gym, but my interest in movement and embodiment transcends any particular workout. I’ve effused a bit about it here — these thoughts are (and remain, for now) pretty nascent, though. I once developed and co-taught a short course for middle schoolers incorporating guided stretch routines alongside discussions of how embodiment interfaces with {schooling, creative expression, technology}.
I didn’t invent the idea of a failure resume, but I wrote one several years ago and quite a few people resonated with it — perhaps you might too.
I happened to grow up imbibing lots of messaging that people are either “STEM people” or “humanities people”. Discovering the diverse field of science communication — which includes occupations like journalists, museum curators, medical illustrators, policy makers, and much more — was thus very eye-opening to me and felt important to share. I founded an initiative to introduce other teens to enthusiastic role models in science communication and encourage people to conceptualize their identities in more expansive ways.
Before I decided that I wanted to learn how virtual memory works and how to find the maximum flow in a flow network, I was an aspiring media scholar. Drawing from the fields of STS, sociology, and journalism studies in addition to media studies, I sought to analyze social media platforms and tech x society, and write about it for the public like Tressie McMillan Cottom does or Real Life magazine did. That was the long-term vision. Before I switched majors, I authored a few articles about Discord, screenshots, and techno-solutionism.