Hey there! I'm Kelly.

About Me and Software

updated Dec 2023

I like writing software as part of happy teams with high levels of autonomy who are excited about their product. My first software engineering position was at a fleet telematics company that had positive people who were glad to mentor new engineers, which left an impression on me for how I'd like to contribute to others' growth.

I next spent time at Tableau, a data visualization company acquired by Salesforce. There, I primarily worked on Tableau's Virtual Connections content type which shipped in 2021. The goal with that was to give people better ways to manage row-level security.

Today, I work at Snowflake, a cloud database company. The storage and compute separation at Snowflake makes it very easy for users to scale as needed per query. The way it mostly works out of the box means that people can focus on shaping and analyzing their data rather than fiddling with optimization and configuration of a data warehouse. It's honestly a pretty cool product.

About Me and Chemistry

Prior to the software career, I was a formulations chemist. Had the pleasure of working on various drugs from peptides, hormones, anti-cancer drugs, opioids, vasopressors and more. Designing experiments and carrying them out has a slower iteration loop than programming, but they both involve planning, anticipating problems, troubleshooting, and effective execution.

I love learning, making plans, and executing them. I enjoy the process of iteration and I like to think I voraciously apply it in multiple domains of my life.

Fun Things

updated Nov 2022

I started sport climbing outdoors in the summer of 2022 and visited crags in North Bend, Mt. Erie, Frenchman Coulee, and Squamish for the first time. I've had the fortune of meeting many new friends who are positive, driven, and stoked to climb--and also lucky to accumulate more climbing trips with a set of great people.

One challenge continues to be balancing my enjoyment of the classic deadlift and bench press with the recovery time that climbing skill acquisition seems to require from me. I love that climbing gyms have power cages, barbells, and an assortment of free weights. I have started playing around with hangboarding and spray walls.

I've been sketching sporadically, but I haven't been consistent about that. Drawing is more of a "do it if I feel like it" hobby. I really enjoy my Pentel GraphGear 1000 for pencil drawing. I also like writing notes with Pentel EnerGel 0.5mm, and Sakura Pigma Micron 05 for making holiday and birthday cards.

I got 100% of the Steam achievements for Age of Empires IV...

Current Tech-Related Focus

Make it work, make it right, make it fast...

Working on being aware of tradeoffs with every design decision. Paying attention to how more senior engineers make architectural decisions and what they do when they hit gnarly problems. Looking for ways to review code more efficiently and informatively. Understanding how to accumulate beneficial influence in an organization and advocate for myself, my team, and doing the right thing.

Topics on Rotation

I have a few different books I read chapters on or revisit every so often.

• The Knot Book: An Elementary Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Knots
• The Elements of Computing Systems (also known as nand2tetris)
• Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual.
• Jim Kurose's Computer Networking, a Top-Down Approach
• Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective by Randal Bryant

Technologies

Things I've touched

Go, C, C#/Unity, .NET, Racket (a Lisp), JavaScript, TypeScript, React, AWS stuff, Angular 2+, MSSQL, PostgresQL, Java, Standard Meta Language

Things I'm currently touching the most

TypeScript, React, Python