Hi! My name's Kat and I'm an engineer at Microsoft! Before that, I was the lead maintainer/architect of the NPM CLI for like 4 years, and the author of npx. I've also done a bunch of community and D&I work outside of that, along with more non-NPM open source!

These days, I'm spending my non-work time working on a co-op platform to help artists make a living, and also doing Rust-based projects and tooling.

What I've Done

• npm@5, npx, and npm ci.
• Various reusable npm packages, like pacote, cacache, make-fetch-happen, and more!
• I launched Banchan Art, an open source co-operative marketplace where artists can sell commissions free of exploitation.
• I've been involved in the Rust community for a bit now, and written a number of really handy tools and libraries, such as miette, cacache, ssri, kdl, node-semver, big-brain, chownr, and others. I also try to be a good citizen and send patches to things when I run into stuff!
• I invented a new configuration-oriented document language called KDL that's going to blow your socks off. It's better than YAML, at least. 😉
• I launched WeAllJS as an experiment in building healthy communities, and wrote the WeAllJS Code of Conduct for it.
• I launched package.community as a place for package manager devs to gather and share notes with each other!
• I wrote a widely-shared and used article about inclusion of non-binary folks in "women's spaces"!

What I'm Working On

• I'm working on a new, next-generation node_modules/ package manager called Orogene, aiming to be fast, safe, and featureful.
• I'm the lead dev on Banchan Art, a platform co-operative aiming to help artists make an easier, safer living with digital art.
• I admin WeAllJS and package.community and help keep them happy, healthy, inclusive communities.
• I finished getting KDL 1.0.0 specs out the door and now I'm moving on to supporting new implementations, particularly maintaining kdl-rs.
• I'm actively developing miette, the best damn error/diagnostic reporting library in the entire Rust ecosystem (or any ecosystem?), if I may say so myself.
• I contribute to the bevy in the form of big-brain, and to the nushell by helping them improve the overall error definition and messaging story across the project.
• I'm maintaining node-semver-rs, a Rust implementation of node-semver, which is super important for anyone wanting to build NPM/JavaScript tooling in Rust.
• I participate in communities, providing mentorship and advice in relevant areas of expertise.

What Sponsorship Does

Aside from what the tiers get you, sponsoring me enables me to keep finding ways to contribute to communities, both in code/tools, and in community work, and it helps me justify spending time on this outside of the scope of my day job!