Nice to e-meet you!
I'm kf Fellows, pronounced like the letters: kay eff. My pronouns are they/them. I’m a coder based in Portland, OR.
Work
For about half of my career, I’ve worked in analytics engineering, and the other half I’ve spent in site reliability engineering—applying analytics skills to engineering practices. In a past life, I did a lot of functional programming and gave dozens of professional trainings on programming in Clojure. I have always worked remotely, primarily on distributed, international teams, and I intend to continue that streak as long as possible!
Interested in reading a little more about my work? Check out
- , where I’ve worked since 2020;Webflow
- , where I was a backend engineering manager in 2020;Netlify
- , where I started an infrastructure team for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services from 2018-2020;Ad Hoc
- , where I spent the summer of 2018 hacking on service meshes;Turbine Labs
- , where I started the analytics team from 2017-2018;Splice
- , where I was an early data engineer and SRE from 2015-2017;Simple
- , where I got my start in the tech industry in 2014-2015; orComcast
- , where I spent 2013-2014 wandering around San Francisco, freelancing at startups.Self-Employed
In my spare time, I've served on the program committees for conferences like Strange Loop, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Clojure/West, and Philly ETE. I've also been a co-organizer of Open Source Bridge, formerly an annual conference in Portland for OSS contributors. Additionally, I co-organized both the Philly and Portland chapters of Papers We Love for several years.
Education
I went to University of Houston-Clear Lake for undergrad in literature, math, and teaching, wrapping up my studies in 2012.
In 2013, I left rural East Texas to attend Hackbright Academy, then a code school for women and nonbinary people in San Francisco.
In 2020, I went back to school part-time to study for an M.B.A. in business analytics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
I incorporate DEI into everything I do, but previously I have
- Served on the board for Bridge Foundry, an umbrella nonprofit that provides workshops in programming languages for people from underrepresented backgrounds in tech. You may have attended one of our workshops through RailsBridge, ClojureBridge, ScalaBridge, or GoBridge.
- Mentored and volunteered for Hackbright Academy, a code school for women and nonbinary people in San Francisco.
- Mentored and volunteered for Techtonica, a nonprofit code school for low-income women and nonbinary people in San Francisco.
- Mentored and served on the Fellows selection committee for Code2040, a nonprofit focusing on Black and Latinx racial equity in the tech industry.
- Been an early key-holding member at Double Union, a feminist hackerspace for women and nonbinary people in San Francisco.
- Been a crisis counselor for Crisis Text Line, a nonprofit that provides SMS-based response for people in mental health crisis.
- Given talks about software engineering at about a dozen different schools and programs for high school students in Portland.
- Introduced the first junior engineers in the company at two of my previous tech jobs, Simple and Splice.
Currently, I am
- A moderator for the Hackbright Academy alumni Slack.
- A moderator for acab.lgbt, a Discord I started for (gender)queer, nonbinary, and trans computer folks. We're over 100 members and growing! 📈
- An occasional industry volunteer for Portland State University's We in Computer Science student group.
I am very keen to help out just about any group working on DEI, particularly in the STEM sphere. Please reach out via one of the social networks below if you think I could be useful!