Katherine Temkin
CEO at Tilt Five
Denver, Colorado, United States
Summary
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RockstarKatherine Temkin is a hardware-focused software leader and CEO with 14 years of experience building low-level systems, embedded firmware, and developer tools. She has led engineering teams at Great Scott Gadgets and Tilt Five and now runs Tactile Metrology, blending hands-on hardware design with product leadership. Her open-source work includes deep contributions to high-profile projects like Atmosphère (custom Nintendo Switch firmware) and USB tooling such as FaceDancer and Luna, demonstrating expertise in SDMMC, USB protocols, and HDL gateware. Katherine is comfortable moving between Python-based device emulation, FPGA/HDL development, and bare-metal system initialization, often tackling subtle timing and initialization bugs. Colleagues know her for pragmatic problem-solving that surfaces useful tooling and diagnostics—like adding print-to-display console logging to aid hardware bring-up. Based in Denver, she pairs a hacker ethos with structured engineering processes to ship robust embedded systems.
14 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (17)
ec10
test-driven-design10
back-end-development10
python10
el10
usb10
c-programming10
hardware10
initialization10
initializer10
sys10
sd-mmc10
fpga10
embedded10
initialize10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
greatscottgadgets/facedancer
Aug 2017 - May 2020
Implement your own USB device in Python, supported by a hardware peripheral such as Cynthion or GreatFET
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:61 commits, 12 PRs, 72 pushes in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Katherine primarily contributed to the FaceDancer project, implementing and refining core functionality for emulating USB devices. Their work included the development of a USB proxy, handling control requests, and improving the overall device emulation process. They also worked on device initialization, endpoint configuration, and adding host-side support features. These contributions suggest a focus on the project's internal workings and the low-level details of USB device interaction.
greatfet
greatscottgadgets/luna
Oct 2019 - Jul 2021
Amaranth HDL framework for monitoring, hacking, and developing USB devices
Role in this project:Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT Developer
Embedded Systems Engineer / IoT DeveloperContributions:10 reviews, 382 commits, 48 PRs in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Katherine appears to be working on low-level USB device gateware design, based on the Amaranth HDL framework. The commits involve creating or modifying low-level hardware components, implementing core functionality, and writing tests to validate its function, including support for the high-speed USB protocol. The contributions include addressing specific issues such as multi-packet transmission and potential timing problems.
developinghdlusbmultitoolusb-devices
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