About

Hi, I'm Kit. I am a husband. I am a father. I am a technologist. I have lots of opinions. I work on M&A due diligence.

The site is named 7 foot tall cactus which is a reference to me being my High School mascot, which was a 7 foot tall cactus outfit.

Life and Family

I was born and raised in the US. I started traveling for work in my early 20s, and wanted to travel. My employer started sending me on long term assignments overseas. While working on an assignment in Dublin, Ireland, I met my future husband online. We met and after about 9 months of trying to figure out our lives, we became a couple. We have been together for over 20 years and married for over 16 years.

In 2006 I moved to the UK indefinitely to be with my husband, becoming a UK Citizen a few years later. We eventually converged on wanting to have a family and spent many years planning and researching. One of the things we knew would be hard is raising a family in London, where we were living. While we considered elsewhere in the UK, we wondered if Australia or New Zealand would be a better choice for us, so we took off for 3 months in 2016/2017 to visit South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand. After we returned home, we started to try to find a way to get to Australia or New Zealand.

As our son was on the way, via surrogacy in the US, I got a sponsored visa to relocate to Australia, and so at the start of 2018 we up roots in the UK and migrated to Australia. Our son arrived in August of 2018. Now we have settled in the suburbs of Melbourne and focus on family life, raising our son, and enjoying a good life.

Projects

I have been lucky to be heavily involved in open source software for the last 12 years. I have worked on some great software and pursued some passion projects. Here are some of my more interesting projects:

Deno logo

Deno

A former core team member, having worked on Deno for four and half years. Mainly focused on the TypeScript integration, the language server, and other DX features.

nocuous logo

nocuous

Static code toxicity analysis for JavaScript and TypeScript, based on Erik Dörnenburg's concepts described in How toxic is your code?

oak logo

oak

The most popular server middleware framework for Deno. Adapting a lot of concepts from Express or koa.

Dojo logo

Dojo

Former project lead, taking the "legacy" Dojo Toolkit and re-inventing it as a modern JavaScript/TypeScript web application framework.

entente logo

entente

A convention testing framework for JavaScript/TypeScript.

Fresh Charts logo

Fresh Charts

Server side rendering for Chart.js, intended for use with Fresh.