When we set out to hire a new analyst at RedMonk this past fall, as always, there were a couple of must have skills we looked for. Could a given candidate write? Could they communicate effectively? Were they someone the team would enjoy working with? As much as it might seem like it, however, given that we have one on staff, one of the questions we did not ask was “are you a PhD that taught at Georgia Tech?”
And yet we somehow managed to hire another one.
Meet Kate Holterhoff, the newest – and, for the first time in our history, fifth – RedMonk analyst. While Kate shares some important characteristics with Kelly beyond the PhD and Georgia Tech heritage – like Kelly, she can write, she can communicate and she is someone the team is very excited to work with – Kate brings some interesting new skills and experiences to our merry band.
From a background in academia, she gradually made her way over to the tech industry spending time teaching at the likes of Carnegie Mellon and the aforementioned Georgia Tech, where she worked directly with CS students around subjects like technical communications and writing. Following those stops, she stepped into a more directly technical role, serving first as a software engineer at a digital marketing agency – our first ex-agency hire at RedMonk, notably – and later took on QA and accessibility roles as the importance of those has spiked.
I’ll leave it to her to explain her own tech origin story, but I will say it’s the first time that we’ve hired someone with an origin story that involved H. Rider Haggard.
Like all RedMonk analysts, Kate will be covering a wide swath of developer-related technologies and infrastructure, but her experience and background – particularly the time she spent as a front end engineer – will be a great addition. Beyond the time spent with industry platforms such as AWS, Digital Ocean or Heroku, she’s been knee deep in front end tech from frameworks like React to content platforms such as Drupal, Shopify or WordPress.
To recap, then, Kate can write (she has a book coming out in March), she can communicate (I haven’t given a talk at the Library of Congress, but she has), she’s got experience both in teaching technical students and in doing engineering and QA work herself and we’re confident that you’re going to love talking to her as much as we do.
She even has good taste in beer.
Conversely, all of us at RedMonk have talked to Kate about how lucky we are to have the community around us that we do, and how much she’s going to enjoy hearing from and working with all of you.
Kate’s first day with RedMonk was actually last Monday, but if you haven’t already, you should feel free to go say hello over on Twitter at @KateHolterhoff or follow her blog. If/when things are safe again and RedMonk resumes traveling, you’ll all presumably get a chance to meet Kate in person at an event or RedMonk beers, but in the meantime you’ll almost certainly run into her on Twitter or on a Zoom.
