About me

Hi! I’m mostly a developer, mainly focusing on Python/Django. I live in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I’m passionate about building inclusive communities, technology and conferences, where everyone can feel welcome, valued and at home. I’m also particularly interested in issues around well-being and ethics in tech.

I’m the co-founder of DashCare where we do high quality Django development and consultancy.

I do various talks at conferences that relate to well-being, ethics, inclusivity and similar themes. I sometimes advise conferences and communities about diversity and inclusivity.

I do a lot of volunteer work for the Django community:

• Member of the Django team since 2014, and recently of the security team also. My last major code contribution was adding flexible built-in password validation – nowadays I focus more on community and inclusivity than code.
• Vice Chair of the DSF Code of Conduct Committee since 2017. This involves handling of CoC reports, but recently I’ve also worked on making improvements to many of the processes relating to the CoC.
• Individual member of the Django Software Foundation since 2014.
• Co-organiser of all three editions of Django: Under the Hood, an in-depth conference for the Django community.
• Chair of the Dutch Django Association, which aims to promote Django and the Django community in The Netherlands by organising events and providing support and funds for events organised by others.
• Reviewer of all recent editions of Two Scoops of Django, with a particular focus on security.

I also run a few smaller projects:

• The Less Obvious Conference Checklist is a checklist of less obvious things for event organisers. This list particularly contains many small improvements that are easily overlooked, but which can significantly improve the conference experience. Especially for marginalised groups.
• Open-Source Happiness Packets is a platform to anonymously reach out to the people that you appreciate or to whom you are thankful in your open-source community. I built this with Mikey Ariel to promote kindness in the Django and other open-source communities.
• [django-restricted-sessions(https://github.com/mxsasha/django-restricted-sessions) is a small Django middleware that can restrict Django sessions to an IP (range) and/or user agent. This can limit the impact when a session token is compromised.