Katharine Comes Back: Elite Silicon Valley Engineer Who Got Her Start as a Teen in Second Life Says What She Saw When She Revisited the Virtual World

Last week a veteran Second Life user was summoned back to the virtual world after an absence of many years, because the Stargate teleport system she had created for it no longer worked. This was not a surprise, seeing as the teleporters have been sitting there in SL for roughly 12 years, and that they still depend on a Google-based runtime she had created in 2011 -- when she was a teenage hacker still living with her parents, in England.  

What is perhaps surprising, is this: Katharine Berry now works at Google.

If you are yourself a veteran SLer, you almost surely know her name: Back in 2007, when she was only 15, Katharine created an acclaimed web-to-SL chat and map interface, then a couple years later, an IRC-to-SL interface. This despite the fact that teenage SL users were segregated from the main world back then. And when she finally joined Second Life proper in 2010, she promptly created a giant prim search engine.

I lost track of her in recent years, and sometimes wondered where she had gone. I knew that Linden Lab had attempted to hire her at one point -- “She is scarily smart,” a Linden engineer once confided to me -- and I had wondered why that hadn’t happened. 

But as it turned out, her journey since her days in SL have been amazing, in part because Second Life likely helped her get to where she is now, a well paid engineer living in the San Francisco Bay Area, enjoying the California sun after years growing up beneath cloudy British skies. 

Her brief return to SL is also important, because she now sees the world with far more experienced eyes.  

This is the story of Katharine Berry since Second Life, and what she saw when she came back:

Her next stop after the SL teen grid was MIT. Because why not go from creating hacks for a virtual world at your parents’ home to the world’s greatest technology university? She even mentioned her various SL projects on her application, which likely helped her gain admission.  

“At the time, going to the best university for computer science seemed like a reasonable decision,” she explains to me now. 

But due to the stress of the coursework and moving at such a young age to another country, her start was quite rocky:

“I almost entirely failed the first year, and was put on ‘medical withdrawal’ due to depression. After a year away from MIT with treatment and also taking classes at Boston University's Metropolitan College (MIT required me to get at least all Bs, which I did easily), I returned to MIT and generally had a much better time of it -- lots of As.”

She did maintain some SL presence during her MIT years, working on several development projects, including the Exodus Viewer.

“For the most part, though, I drifted away from Second Life, semi-intentionally. Most of my friends were still stuck on the Teen Grid (which still existed at the time), and the Teen Grid split had the effect we'd always expected it would -- those of us on both sides of the divide tended to drift away as our friend groups got split across the divide. When they removed the split in 2011, I did buy back my old teen grid mainland plot, and I keep it basically unchanged to this day.”

But other projects were calling: After developing several tools for the Pebble smartwatch while at MIT, bored with her current coursework, she was hired near instantly by the company founder: 

“I shot Eric [Migicovsky] an email asking whether he was interested in hiring me, and seven minutes later got back an ‘of course’ -- which is definitely the quickest I've ever gone from ‘application’ to being accepted. A few weeks later I packed up and moved to Mountain View, California, and I've hovered around Silicon Valley ever since.”

After a series of layoffs, she jumped to Intel to help create AR glasses, and then to Google, where she’s now working on another wearable project, “though I can't say much about that for obvious reasons.”

After repairing her old Stargate in SL (which you can visit here), she was about to log off. But an Instant Message kept her on:

“One of my friends from long ago pinged me just before I was going to head off and we hung out while she showed me some of the things she'd built in my absence. The ingenuity of the people in Second Life never ceases to astound me, especially given that the platform itself is full of frustrations when building anything. A sense of both nostalgia for the world of old and wonder at what people have been doing in the meantime. Mixed, of course, with a mild undercurrent of frustration at Second Life continuing to be buggy and awkward.” 

Notwithstanding those flaws, she wound up wandering the world to see what was new -- for some seven hours. 

Despite now working at Silicon Valley’s most massive and powerful tech company, Katharine maintains great affection for the aging virtual world, and is open to developing for it again. 

“I have a particular soft spot for SL, after effectively growing up with it, but unless I found a community again I think it’s unlikely I’ll be getting back into SL in a big way,” as she puts it. (She did many years ago receive a job offer from Linden Lab itself, she confirms to me, but the terms and the timing didn’t work out.)

Her thoughts on where Second Life currently stands, now seen from the perspective of 10 years studying and working at MIT, Intel, Google, and so on? 

“I don't know that I've spent enough time around SL in a long time to meaningfully comment,” she caveats at first. “That said, it feels like it's still stuck in 2010 — things that once felt solid now feel somewhat creaky. (Chat, in particular, has not kept up with the times -- no emoji, no image sharing? Not good for anyone in my social circles, and a social platform with bad communication tools is in trouble).  More broadly, fifteen years later, I still don't think I have a good answer to the question of ‘What is Second Life?’, and consequently I don't know where it should go.

“A lot of the niches I would've expected Second Life to fill have already seen more success elsewhere: while I know that this is numerically false, the impression I get at least in my social circle is that VRChat has long since overtaken SL as the freeform virtual socializing space, while socialization feels like it has pivoted to games like Fortnite / Apex Legends / etc. — where creating things is broadly handled for you, and you can just have fun (and do it at more than 20 FPS with flaky scripting and textures that unload themselves for no reason). It's also worth noting that much of my circle is creative types - artists, writers, etc. - the people who historically I might've expected to be particularly attracted to SL.

“Second Life feels to me like it has stagnated, and I do not know whether you could fix that without losing a lot of what Second Life is and why it remains popular among its users. (Especially given that the user base is among the most stubborn I have seen. The fact that most people are still using the old profile system nine years after it was ‘replaced’ is amazing.)

“I will say that, despite everything, I miss it.”

Broadly speaking, I think it’s fair to say Second Life misses her too, and people like her. But until and unless she returns, you can always enjoy her Stargate teleportation devices  -- click here to teleport to her teleporter. 

Stargate photo courtesy Katharine. Second photo from this New World Notes post.

Comments

[Petra McKinnel]

Wait..
There's SOCIALISATION ?
In FORTNITE ?
How on earth have I missed that?
All I've seen is lighning-speed combat, mostly with strangers, occasionally fighting beside a friend.
Where do they socialise afterwards?

[Wagner James Au]

Fortnite has a whole social hangout area with dancing, group movie watching, etc. with no combat:

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2020/05/fortnite-metaverse-chris-nolan-party-royale-tenet.html

[Summer Haas]

I share her sentiments about lack of emoji support. What's surprising though is when you ask other residents about it, they are either indifferent or adamantly opposed to it, which I think is reflective of the much older age demographic that largely makes up the regular users. And before anyone brings it up, yes I am aware of Windows+. but that only works on Windows 10 and is more of a workaround than a proper implementation.

Anyways, her work with megaprim.sl nudged LL to add support for larger prims, her Ajaxlife program spurred LL to work on a short lived SL chat program, which I believe is being reworked on now, her work on Exodus contributed to the addition of materials being added, and I have no doubt if she was still involved we would have emoji support today.

[Valentina Kendal]

I remember those stories about her from back in the day, I'm delighted to hear she has done well for herself! As someone who also recently came back to SL after 5 years away (I was active in SL 2006-15) her comments resonate. I feel a sense of nostalgia for the old SL, with lots of people being creative in lots of ways using the tools the gods made available to us, whether it was AVs, jewelry, landscaping, sex HUDs or art. There is definitely still creativity in SL, but so much of it feels creaky, as she says. I constantly find myself in Chat trying to do things I would do in WhatsApp, and the hardware demand for a good experience seems much higher than before. But as long as we keep paying, I don't think LL has much of an incentive to make things better.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Just because SL chat doesn't have some button you can click on to choose emoji doesn't mean it lacks emoji support, it supports Unicode, you can use any emoji you want.

[Summer Haas]

@Chrono OK boomer

[Luther Weymann]

The code that provides for a single login into multiple secure applications and databases across multiple disparate operating systems has long been established in the mainframe world. The 3M company in St Paul solved that in the early 1980s. Their problem was how to get consolidated business reporting across so many custom applications and multiple unrelated operating systems. During this early 1980's project, 3M also solved the passing of database tables from one database application to another database application across multiple operating systems. Today, that is how the mainframe world does its consolidated business reporting.

With the financial resources, the right people, the vision, and desire, Secondlife could have a new grid, a new Secondlife world. And in that new world, your current avatar could seamlessly teleport into that new Secondlife world from our current Secondlife and then teleport back. What assets it can go back and forth with is the real issue.

The mainframe business has been solving highly complex database problems like this for the past 35 years and making it work. I've seen it myself. I remain totally convinced this is attainable for Secondlife.

[Ryan Schultz]

Great blogpost! Thanks.