Hi, I'm Ivana. 🖐️

I'm a Pythonista with a computer science background currently working as a senior software engineer at Sentry. I'm also an occasional speaker and workshop coach.

Bio

I have a master's degree in computer science from University of Gothenburg in Sweden and a bachelor's degree in social and work psychology from Comenius University in Slovakia. I worked in cybersecurity for a couple of years before moving on to web development and API design at wegfinder. At the moment I am a senior software engineer at Sentry, working on the open source Python SDK.

I am occasionally active in the community, mostly in projects aiming to increase diversity in tech. I've been a mentor at several workshops (e.g. PyLadies). I also sometimes give talks at conferences and I've contributed to a couple of open source projects (e.g. Django Girls, Simply Love).

Talks

  • Embracing Weird Code

    PyCon Austria 2025

    Becoming a maintainer of a project that integrates with more than 60 popular packages has taught me a lot about weird code, monkeypatching, testing, collaboration, and life in general. (But mostly weird code.)

    Join me on a journey of exploring weirdness, ambiguity, and small API surfaces.

  • How to Avoid Becoming a 10x Engineer

    EuroPython 2020

    Why you should ignore advice by random internet people, by a random internet person.

    The internet has never failed at being, among other things, a giant treasure of unsolicited advice by random people on all sorts of things, programming being no exception. Wanna become a better coder? Learn to maximize your WPM (c). Never look at documentation because that's just embarrasing. And for crying out loud, change your screen background to black!

    So there you are, a fairly okay programmer, looking for ways to become better at coding. How do you achieve that? Well I'm no 10x engineer myself (thank goodness), but I do believe that there's a handful of things we can safely rule out.

  • import bacon

    EuroPython 2019, PyDays Austria 2019

    It's often said that Python comes with batteries included, meaning that the standard library can do basically anything except for maybe conjure bacon for you (though I heard that's coming in 3.8). I don't think we fully appreciate the sheer vastness of it, though, so I went through it module by module looking for hidden gems (sorry, eggs). This is a by no means exhaustive compilation of the useful, the underrated, and the funny.

Where to Find Me

Feel free to reach out to me at my first name at amarion.net or via one of the following channels: