About this Site

How many times will I write and rewrite one of the first pages someone who doesn't know me will read? I'm up to four!

Welcome!

My name is Kitt Hodsden. This is my personal website.

Somewhere herein, you'll find things that interest me, things I'd like to share with the Internet®, and things I'd like to remember at some point in the murky future. This site is, however, more for me than you.

I grew up in Indiana, but have lived on the West Coast most of my life, enduring the heat of the Phoenix desert and the cold of the Ottawa winters along the way.

I do contract/freelance/consulting work for a living (my resume). I've had my share of "real jobs," where you work in the same office with the same people every day, and I can work in that environment if the people are amazing, but I prefer the flexibility of working from home in my PJs at 2:00 am, or from a cafe in Sydney, to a strict 8-to-5-you're-fired-if-you-come-in-at-9 schedule (yep, had one of those).

I love tech. I've been working with computers since forever. I'm full-stack web developer, in pretty much every definition (system administration through front-end performance tuning). I love giving talks on making websites faster. Back end work, I do a lot of work in PHP and JavaScript, and Ruby. I used to be a Drupal expert, but Drupal 8 really became an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction, so I wandered away to Node, Rails, SInatra, and Django. I have past experience with Perl, C, C++, and Java, but stay away from those for the most part these days. I'm happiest using Linux as my operating system, but I'm content on a MacOS box (all that FreeBSD heritage and all).

I used to play ultimate a lot, before a knee injury and a players' association name change, so now I play only as much as I possibly can. The highlight of my career was playing for Mischief, a Mixed team in the hardest, we're-big-enough-to-be-our-own-region Northern California section, when we won the Mixed Division Championships in 2006. I do love playing, still, even if my body doesn't keep up as well.

I'm a founding director of Hacker Dojo, a community center for hackers, tinkerers, creatives and creators. It's a fantastic place to cowork, host or attend events, and step into the Silicon Valley community. Stop by if you have time!

Oddly enough, most people think I'm a guy before they meet me, or if they have interacted with me via only email or on the phone. Most people assume programmers are male, and the name Kitt doesn't exactly specify gender, neither does my voice. If I went by my original, given name, well then, you'd be at a different website right now.

The site was named by James Pine, a friend of mine and ex-coworker. The two of us were partner programming and I was bugging him about changing something. When he declined to change whatever it was, I changed tactics, but continued to bug him. He asked me if I was going to continue with these "nags of a similar ilk." I liked the name. It has a better ring to it than iKitt. Though, James Byers has suggested "Kitt Co. Heavy Industries." Amusingly enough, I now own kitt.co, so maybe I could switch.

Any content here that I haven't created, I've included attributes and copyright details when I knew the source. Such content is copyright the original author/source, and not me.

If you'd like to contact me, I'm easily reached. Please note that any email sent to me can be quoted on this site. I dislike publishing email addresses on the web (a lot of email spam comes from website harvesters), but reserve the right to do so when quoting any particularly hateful or virtriolic email received.

If you prefer regular mail, drop me a line.

My most common verbal bits of the moment are "Okay, so" (an enduring Kitt-ism), "nominally", and "pretty much". Older ones include "random", "N number of" and "hilarous". You can pretty much track my speech patterns from my Kitt-isms.

So, poke around, enjoy the site. If something is inaccurate or if I accidently didn't give credit to the proper author, please let me know.

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