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Kathy's famous not just for the harassment she received. She was one of (if not the) first to bring the user into Internet product design. Her point was that users want to feel good about themselves ("kick ass") and then get them into flow, so your job as product designer is to give them that feeling from the get-go.
Her book Badass <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VAUIM18/> has some of that in it, but also covers her focus on perceptual learning -- the kind of learning that chicken sexers do (you get feedback on whether you were right or wrong, but not how to improve, yet that's enough to get better over time). That focus was as a result of her other career, training horses.
She created the "Head First" series of books, which changed what and how computer instruction books worked. She's still out there teaching and training people in how to help their users succeed: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBtcGwHPMKM>.
Please don't send Kathy down in history known only for what men did to her. She deserves to be known for what she created.
Yes! Her work had a major impact on how my team grew up on product and ux design, while we were at the time "web developers" (which had kind of a different feel/meaning back in 2005 from what it means today) playing with "toys".
This website hasn't been updated since April 2007. It's a blog/blogging platform named "Creating Passionate Users" not about creating them. The most visible[0] entry (April 6th) seems to be lamenting users. The site has been posted to HN numerous times[1], mostly in 2008 and before (when the context was more obvious?)
[0]: https://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=headrush.typepad.com
For context, this is the blog of Kathy Sierra who was driven out of the tech industry by harassment: