Howdy!

...and thanks for stopping by.

I started out at the University of Oklahoma as a geographic information science student, learning to see the world in layers: ArcGIS, ENVI, and Landsat scenes stacked into maps. An internship with NASA DEVELOP had me tracing 30 years of red spruce change from satellite imagery, and I was hooked on what spatial data could reveal.

Then I found the other half of my story: data at scale. Alongside geography, I studied Economics and Big Data, earning two bachelor's degrees and a master's in five years, and code became the first tool I reached for. At E. & J. Gallo Winery, I got to do some genuinely cool science: I designed a method in Google Earth Engine and R that read vineyard health from satellite imagery and tied it to irrigation. Between organizing a sprawling file system and heading into the rows to sample the grapes, it was my first taste of science that ran from the satellite to the vine. At UT Austin's Bureau of Economic Geology, I wrangled large oil and gas datasets in R to map unconventional drilling across the US, and shared the results in papers, posters, and talks.

Meanwhile, the field kept moving, and so did I. Geospatial scientists are now expected to do more than make maps: to build the pipelines, ship the code, and keep the data trustworthy end to end. At Grassroots Carbon, I grew from Carbon Technical Manager, screening ranches with RShiny and QGIS, into a Data Engineer, going from Python novice to production pipelines in less than a year and a half. Today I build Python pipelines to model soil carbon reductions and removals, containerize them with Docker, deploy them with cron and GitHub Actions, and validate with Pydantic. I've processed a dozen datasets onto Uber's H3 hexagonal index as Parquet files on AWS S3, and I review my colleagues' pull requests as carefully as I rewrite my own code.

AI has changed how I work, too. Along with writing well over ten thousand lines of code by hand, I lean on Claude, Gemini, and Copilot to move faster, and placed in the top 5 of 27 in a company-wide AI competition. The tools will keep changing, and I plan to keep learning faster than they do.

My mantra, in life and at work, is "I can do hard things." I live it daily by meditating, cold plunging, weightlifting, and keeping habits I track in a personal app I built for the purpose. I do my best work surrounded by smart, hardworking people who treat others with respect and share the same goals.

All my best,
Katy