I'm Kim Burchett. This site serves as my public soap box, especially for thoughts related to programming, programming languages and leftist politics. As you might have guessed from my writings, I'm a software engineer and manager and enjoy challenging, high-impact roles at developing companies. I'm also the wife of a lovely lady, Haley Hieronymus, who spends much of her time in front of a lab bench. We live in the Boston area, in a quirky, turn of the century Brookline home where we have learned the joys of power saws, home wiring, and how to get latex paint out of clothing. We also travel a fair bit and have the photos to prove it.

I work at StreamBase, a small company that builds a stream processing system. My tasks there range from project mangement to architecture and design. I spend most of my day sticking my nose into design discussions, reviewing bugs and feature requests, and generally doing whatever is necessary to make sure the product has everything it needs to be technically successful. Before StreamBase, I was a senior software engineer at Endeca, where I spent my day working on server-side C++ software, with occasional forays into Java, Perl, and C#. If you're interested in more about what I do for a living, check out my resume.

I'm currently also working towards a master's degree in computer science at Brown University. I expect to finish in January 2007. School has been incredibly exciting for me and has kindled my passion for several new CS topics. I've taken classes covering parallel and distributed computing, combinatorial optimization, computational biology, formal verification, machine learning, and natural language processing. I have been pursuing independent research involving static optimization of a dynamically typed functional reactive programming language called FrTime.

I'm always interested in learning new things. When I first started programming I was fascinated by graphics, so I learned a lot about shading models, radiosity, animation, and physical modeling. That evolved into an interest in fractals, artificial life, and genetic algorithms. I actually got a job working on genetic algorithms at one point. Eventually my hobby shifted over to programming languages. After learning Scheme, Prolog and Forth, I (mistakenly) felt I had run out of interesting new programming languages to learn, so I studied Mandarin Chinese for two years at Harvard. Since then, I've come back to programming languages, having studied Python, Erlang, Joy, OCaml, and (my current favorite) Haskell. I am currently (late 2006) interested in statistical estimation and machine learning.

I sporadically launch new spare-time projects, some of which I have actually finished. My most popular project so far was Diamond Wiki, but it went through a bit of a crisis which killed my passion for the project.

I used to play the cello rather well but have let my abilities fade. I like most music except reggae and pop. Some of favorite styles are industrial (Nine Inch Nails, VNV Nation), alternative (Cibo Matto, P.J. Harvey), experimental noise (Robert Normandeau), and modern (Lee Hyla). I also like hip hop, lounge, and bluegrass.

kimbly AT kimbly DOT com