Kaylie's Blog(?)

Résumé

Intro

Hello! I’m Kaylie, an experienced backend developer with history in game engine design, compiler and VM design, software optimization, operations security, and embedded development. I’m familiar with C#, Rust, C, C++, Lua, WebAssembly, Assembly (x86, AArch64), TypeScript, and several others with the ability to pick up new programming languages, tools, and environments in a week or two.

I’m a US citizen seeking work in the EU, and currently staying in Belgium in the mid-term with a friend. The EU is proving absolutely lovely, and I’ve been learning dutch for a decent bit now (albeit slowly)!

Notable Past Experience

Space Station 14 (former Project Manager and Maintainer)

I directly contributed to Space Station 14 and it’s associated game engine RobustToolbox for about three years (11/2021 - 06/2024), some highlights include:

  • Full rewrites of many core game APIs to simplify their usage and improve their overall capabilities.
  • Pentesting and red-teaming for RobustToolbox to help ensure the security of users connecting to third-party servers.
  • Assisting with the R&D for a potential future move to Wasmtime as a sandboxing solution instead of the current home-grown solution.
  • Design and implementation of Toolshed, a command-line DSL and interpreter used to debug and modify the game at runtime, and serves as the primary implementation of console commands.
  • Much time and effort spent on-boarding new programmers, and improving the workflow for creating new projects with the game and engine.

OpenDream (open source contributor)

Opendream is another end user of RobustToolbox, which I both provide advising to and assist with the optimization of. Some highlights include:

  • Significant performance optimizations to the DreamMaker VM implementation alongside a coworker, improving the execution of the underlying bytecode loop by analyzing the JIT results and improving its output.
  • Majority of implementation of proper object GC for DreamMaker objects, fixing a longstanding issue that prevented objects from properly “soft del"ing that bloated memory usage unnecessarily.
  • General advisory on compiler design and optimization approaches, including implementing some small “peephole” optimizations for the underlying bytecode.

Personal projects

bevy-convars

As part of a larger joint project between PJB and myself, bevy-convars was written to fill a gap in the Bevy ecosystem around full-featured game configuration options. It’s a fairly comprehensive, documented library for Bevy 0.16.

This Website

This website is built on Hugo, with custom CSS, no javascript, and a lot of obsession over making it look good for multiple different views (print, light, dark, with or without high contrast). You may in fact be reading this from the PDF/print copy, visit https://afterlight3149.net/ for the site itself.

Afterlight 3149

Afterlight 3149 was a mod/fork of Space Station 14 that completely reworked the game loop with my own take on the game’s design, favoring many small 4-8 player spaceships instead of the single 80 player station and much longer game times (24-72hr) with an overall slower pace. Working on it was a major learning experience for me and taught me a lot of proper software engineering practices that then went on to be used to build upstream systems like Toolshed and world generation.

Contact

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