After coming into contact with Linux and the broader Free Software movement, I decided to get into programming and joined the IT squad of the Belgian Pirate Party to build up experience. Here I learned to take ownership of improvements I saw, analyse and communicate them, and learned to collaborate where needed to get issues recognised and resolved.
In 2018 I joined the Pleroma project as a developer, and later switched most of my contributions to Akkoma, a popular Pleroma fork which is also used by GenServer Social for the Elixir community. Here I got the bulk of my engineering experience, analysing issues, debug code, understand structure and design, analyse and translate feature requests into working code… Being Open Source, this means most of the work is self-directed, ensuring speedy and reliable solutions.
I like to learn by building and playing with different technologies and concepts, and I’ve been self hosting several services over the years. I also occasionally contribute to OpenStreetMap and Wikimedia projects.