Tibs (Tony Ibbs)

I am currently (since January 2022) a Developer Educator at Aiven

Before that, I described myself as:

• A general programmer, used to taking on whatever tasks are necessary, either as an individual or as part of a group, acquiring any new skills required, and providing appropriate solutions. My skills centre around producing clear, well commented, maintainable code that does what the customer requires.
• A toolsmith. I enjoy writing and maintaining tools and documentation that help myself and others to do our jobs.
• Able to act as a "software archaeologist", performing deep dives into the code base to understand, explain and fix problems.

I've used Python since 1994, Ruby from 2019 to 2021, and C from 1988 to 2014, and once spent a very satisfying year embedding Java into a GIS. I've also written C++ at various times.

I have been using reStructuredText and markdown since they were invented, and am enthusiastic about Vale

I'm operating system agnostic -- I've done a significant amount of work on various Unices (including Solaris and Linux), Windows NT and others, Mac OS and VMS.

I used XEmacs for 15 years, then Vim for 15 years, and have now moved to Doom Emacs with Evil mode, but I quite like PyCharm and the Visual Studio environments as well. I've worked with FrameMaker, Tex/LaTeX, Runoff, Office and its relatives and HTML and its variants.

I've worked in various fields, starting out in Geographic Information Systems, then embedded Linux systems (Set Top Boxes) and a variety of consultancy roles, followed by backend web development as a Python programmer with Flask or Django, and as a Ruby programmer with Rails. Somehow, changing to Developer Relations seemed like a natural next step.

I enjoy learning new things, and am happy to explore new fields of endeavour.

I helped start the Cambridge Python Users Group (CamPUG) in 2007, and ran it until September 2022. In 2017 I was awarded a John Pinner Award for services to the UK Python community because of this work.

In recent years I have given several talks at conferences. They can be found on github, with links to videos where available:

• Fish and Chips and Apache Kafka®, given at PyCon UK 2022
• Beyond spellchecking - what else can we check automatically?, given (virtually) at Write the Docs Prague 2022
• Redis: persistent collections as a service (and for fun), given at PyCon UK 2018.
• A history of markup languages, given at various venues including PyCon UK 2017 and Write the Docs Prague 2018.
• An amble through the history of Python, given as a workshop at PyCon UK 2017 (so no video).

I have also regularly talked at CamPUG; the slides and notes for these are also on github.

Whilst at Kynesim (2008-2014), I was administrator and principal author of several open-source projects:

• muddle, a build system especially aimed at constructing firmware for embedded systems.
• kbus, a lightweight messaging system for embedded, Linux-based platforms.
• the tstools package, a set of open-source cross-platform command line tools for working with MPEG data.

A one-page summary CV is here as HTML, here as PDF, both generated from this reStructuredText file.

A more detailed CV, with employment history and other matters, is here as HTML, here as PDF, and again as the original reStructuredText.

Other formats can be produced if that would be more convenient.

References are available on request.

A longish summary of my career at Laser-Scan (1980--2003, written in 2003) is available, either as HTML or reStructuredText. This includes a summary of my standards work.

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