Katharina Fey
Software Engineer
Berlin, Germany
Summary
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RockstarKatharina Fey is a seasoned software engineer based in Berlin with 13 years of experience building reliable backend systems and developer tools, particularly in Rust. She’s contributed meaningful improvements to high-profile open-source projects like rust-lang/cargo and the Rust Language Server, focusing on test automation, CLI tooling, and robust error handling. Her work on embedded database internals at sled and on worker/message protocols at Ockam shows deep expertise in data structures, concurrency, and protocol design. Known for pragmatic refactors that improve maintainability, she combines careful engineering with a playful self-description—“mediocre programmer extraordinaire”—and a clear preference for compilers and type-safe systems.
13 years of coding experience
Github Skills (40)
database-migrations10
asynchronous10
cli10
error-reporting10
cargo10
concurrent10
messaging10
package-management10
async10
testing10
command-line-interface10
databases10
schema-design10
language-server-protocol10
prisma10
Programming languages (35)
Github contributions (5)
rust-cli/human-panic
Apr 2018 - Mar 2020
Panic messages for humans.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:23 commits, 33 PRs, 38 pushes in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Katharina primarily focused on improving error handling and the user experience within the `human-panic` crate. They fixed bugs related to data accuracy in crash dumps and enhanced the inclusion of backtraces, leading to more informative error reports. Additionally, they made formatting changes, improved the macro functionality, and refactored code to correctly handle panic messages in different scenarios.
panicrustbothuman-centered-designfor-humans
build-trust/ockam
Feb 2021 - Aug 2022
Orchestrate end-to-end encryption, cryptographic identities, mutual authentication, and authorization policies between distributed applications – at massive scale.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:122 reviews, 314 commits, 68 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Katharina implemented worker functionality for the ockam_node library to support typed user workers, which involved significant refactoring of the internal node structure to support these new worker types. The changes included creating mechanisms for user workers to respond to typed messages and managing workers through a direct supervisor relay. The user's contributions also included adding new protocol-handling logic and new message type implementations with serde.
policyenforcemente2eeidentitycredentials
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