Hi, I’m Kiley! 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

If hobbies were cats, I’d be a crazy cat lady. Alas, I merely have two cats, a dog, and a wife.

I’m currently based in Hollywood, CA; but before that spent several years in San Francisco and Seattle. The Pacific Northwest, in particular, will always own a chunk of my soul.

During the day, I’m an IT Engineer and MacAdmin with well over a decade of professional experience - and even more if you consider getting called out of class in 5th grade to fix the school computer lab!

I’ve given talks at MacDevOpsYVR 2020 and Elastic’s 2020 Global All Hands. You can find my current resumé here.

Besides my work in tech, I’m a ham radio operator and an unrepentant maker. I was a board member for the San Francisco Radio Club for two years (2020 and 2021), and helped co-found the San Francisco Wireless Emergency Mesh (now Bay Area Mesh), which provides high-speed data connectivity during emergencies in the San Francisco area.

Here’s a list of all the ways to find me online.

What’s with the “retro” terminal aesthetic?#

I have a soft spot for technology of the late-80s to early-90s!

Nostalgia certainly informs a good deal of that affinity: I have fond memories of using dumb terminals when I went to the library as a kid in the mid-90s, since their catalog system the venerable Dynyx was designed to use them. My dad also happened to work at a local AV technology company that was an early pioneer in video conferencing, and often brought home old bits of tech they didn’t need for me to dissect and play with. I participated in my first remote meeting when I was six, long before Zoom and Google Meet existed!

Of course, now I have a Hewlet-Packard 700/96 dumb terminal on my workbench, amber phosphor and all. It’s no DEC VT220 like my library had, but it does emulate one rather well. Surprisingly it came in the original box with all the packaging and manuals, which is how I know it’s first home was a flower shop in Akron, OH.