About
Joseph Kato
MathematicsStatisticsLinguisticsOpen source
I'm Joseph Kato. I build open-source tools for working with natural language — the main one, Vale, checks prose the way a linter checks code, and runs in the documentation pipelines of teams like Microsoft, GitHub, and GitLab.
This site is where I write about language, public data, and data visualization — usually alongside a tool or dataset.
9.89M
Downloads
9,937
GitHub stars
2.19M
Docker pulls
Used by
Languages
Primary language across 137 public repositories.
Python 27.1%
Go 21.2%
C++ 8.5%
Svelte 8.5%
JavaScript 6.8%
TypeScript 6.8%
Gherkin 4.2%
Other 16.9%
What I build
Vale CLI
A markup-aware linter for prose built with speed and extensibility in mind.
5,747 Stars 9.89M Downloads
Recognition
Book 2026
Write Better with Vale — Brian P. Hogan, The Pragmatic Bookshelf
Cited 2026
Linting Style and Substance in READMEs — arXiv — Vale cited as closest prior art
Grant 2025
FLOSS Fund — $10,000 — With FFmpeg, Zig, and Blender
Grant 2023
Appwrite OSS Fund — With Algolia, MongoDB, Fastly, and DigitalOcean
Award 2023
Google Open Source Peer Bonus — Nominated by Googlers for exceptional open-source contributions
Golang Weekly — A newsletter about Go with ~80,000 subscribers
Education
B.S. Mathematics
- Magna cum laude — 3.81 / 4.00
- Phi Kappa Phi — top 7.5% of juniors across all disciplines
- Pi Mu Epsilon — the National Mathematics Honor Society
Get in touch
If something here sparked a question, or you'd like to compare notes, reach me at joseph@jdkato.io — or find me on X and GitHub.