Hi! My name's Kat and I'm an engineer on the NuGet client team 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 mainly spending my non-work time doing Rust-based projects and tooling and I hope you all have a great time using them!
What I've Done
- npm@5, npx, and npm ci.
- Various reusable npm packages, like pacote, cacache, make-fetch-happen, and more!
- 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 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.
- 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'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.
- My day job involves working on the NuGet clients. I don't mind tips if you appreciate my work over there, though.
- 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!
95 sponsors are funding zkat’s work.
Featured work
-
zkat/miette
Fancy upgrade to std::error::Error.
Rust 699 -
kdl-org/kdl
the kdl document language specifications
-
NuGet/NuGet.Client
Client Tools for NuGet - including Visual Studio extensions, command line tools, and msbuild support. (Open issues on https://github.com/nuget/home/issues)
C# 563 -
zkat/big-brain
Utility AI library for Rust
Rust 192 -
zkat/cacache-rs
💩 💵 but for your🦀 Rust 154
Select a tier
$5 a month
SelectTaco Tier
- a sponsor
🎖 badge on your profile - access to my (monthly?) newsletter with exclusive news, programming and community thoughts, and other yet-to-be-public open source goodness
- My gratitude. Thank you!
$10 a month
SelectBurrito Tier
- All the previous tier rewards
- Code review on a (reasonable, non-corporate) PR on an open source project!
- Access to an exclusive private repo with an archive of previous update emails, and various other exclusive goodies I'm gonna share with y'all!
$20 a month
SelectBay Area Burger Tier
- All the previous rewards.
- A review of a (non-corporate) conference talk and some advice on delivering it!
- A Patron license to any of my copyleft-licensed projects.
$100 a month
SelectDinner For Two
- All of the previous tier rewards
- A monthly half-hour-long phone or video call where you get to chat with me about whatever you want related to your career, open source, the projects I work on, or other stuff like that! I'm open to ideas! (All discussions non-corporate).
$250 a month
SelectCorporate Tier
- All of the previous tier rewards as a corporate client.
- Taking the above into account, this is about 1hr a month of general consultation/support.

