A headshot of Piper Thunstrom A headshot of Piper Thunstrom

Piper Thunstrom

I'm Piper, pythonista, game enthusiast, and web developer. You might know me from my talks given at conferences around the United States, a local tech meetup, or my open source work. I speak on community building, game development, CS education, and trans identity in tech.

Professional Background

During the day, I'm a web developer, about as full-stack as I can be. I was part of the team in charge of deploys at one job, where we mostly hadn't heard of devops so did a lot of manual ec2 management. I've lived both SQL and noSQL with and without an ORM. Written API services in multiple flavors of Python, Go, and Javascript. Written both great and terrible front end with everything from hand tuned HTML and CSS through to react.

I'm a writer with separate backgrounds in fiction and non-fiction. I quit fiction a long time ago for my health, but still do a lot of technical and creative non-fiction writing. I also edit and do technical vetting, with many projects being in CS education, like Code This Game published with MacMillan's Odd Dot imprint.

Software

My most important project is ppb. It combines my passion for learning and teaching with game development, which is where I learned my stuff. I also make available source and open source games.

Speaking

I primarily speak at regional Python user groups and Python conferences, and am always open to making an appearance. I've given lots of talks on games and my software work. I also talk about being trans in tech and mental health. Every now and then I even talk about my failures.