About

Hello. I'm Kirk Kittell. Some people call me Captain because you know why. I live in St. Louis. It's an interesting place with good people, good beer, and big problems—if you haven't been here, you should visit, I can give you some tips.

As a professional, loosely speaking, I've spent over a decade as a systems engineer—sort of a hybrid semi-engineering discipline that dabbles in product definition (modeling, analysis, stakeholder wrestling, spec writing), making sure the interfaces to other systems work, and then proving the system works the way it's supposed to (analysis, testing, more stakeholder wrestling). It's an interesting discipline because you get to see how The Whole Thing works.

Unprofessionally, strictly speaking, I like to run, travel, read, and organize people to take on problems. I make some kickass eggnog. I run a site called Chinese Word of the Day (@zhwotd on Twitter).

("Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll." is something I stole from the introduction to Generation of Swine by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Most of that book is collected garbage from his time writing for a Hearst paper, unfortunately.)

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Some blog posts that worked out alright:

Affiliations present:

Affiliations past: