Field Notes
The Long Way to a Win
SiteStamp almost didn't happen twice. Built the first version solo in a week for a Gemma hackathon, and missed the actual deadline because the countdown on the submission page turned out to be wrong, not my fault, but still missed either way. I rebuilt and resubmitted to a different Gemma hackathon shortly after, adding real depth this time: asset tracking, an agentic tool to pull a site's inspection history, and a trend chart showing whether a site is improving or deteriorating over time. From there I started submitting to general dev hackathons on Devpost too, past the narrow Gemma-specific window. It placed Top 5 at NeuralSprint. Not the outcome I was chasing when I missed that first deadline, but a better one.
Why "Kata"
My actual nickname is Kira, but it's common enough that it was already taken everywhere I tried to claim it. Kata stuck partly because it's easy to say, and partly because of the double meaning: in karate, a kata is a set sequence of movements practiced until they're second nature. In software, "code kata" means the same thing: deliberate, repeated practice exercises meant to build real skill over time. That's a decent description of how I actually got here.