Kim van Wyk's home on the web

Welcome to Kim van Wyk’s currently-sparse website. I’m a happily married electronic engineer turned software developer/DevOps engineer/data engineer living in eThekwini in South Africa, currently working for SA Home Loans.

This site is a replacement for an ancient and creaking Wordpress site which finally fell over. I intend to bring its contents to this site over time, but as with almost every personal software project, this will take way longer than I think it will.

You can have a look at various pieces of code and software projects I’ve written or contributed to at my GitLab account. My GitHub account is almost entirely mirrored from my GitLab account - all my own projects are at GitLab. I also have a few Docker images at my DockerHub account.

I have a fairly infrequently posted-to Twitter account and a more recent Mastodon account.

I’ve presented a few talks at conferences, including PyConZA:

• At the 2019 in-person PyConZA: Automating infrastructure at SA Home Loans with Python (and friends)
• At the 2020 virtual PyConZA:
  • A talk: Laying some of the foundations so your fellow developers can start on the ground floor
  • A lightning talk: Should we just go home on the third Friday afternoon
• A lightning talk at the 2021 virtual PyConZA: HTMX - AJAXy stuff for little effort
• At the 2022 hybrid PyConZA, with the in-person portion in my hometown of eThekwini: Turning out short-notice voting tools in Django for a suddenly-online convention
• At the 2023 hybrid PyConZA, with the in-person portion again in my hometown of eThekwini: Dynamically serving REST endpoints for database stored procedures with FastAPI - despite the mouthful of a title this talk is mainly about generating code, as in using Jinja2 to make text files of valid code that get executed in a second step

I’ve helped organise the 2020-2024 PyConZA conferences and had the privilege of co-chairing the 2021 online conference and chairing the 2022 and 2023 hybrid conferences.

I’ve had the great pleasure of contributing to several of my favourite technical podcasts:

• As a guest host on Episode 310 of Michael Kennedy’s consistently excellent Talk Python To Me podcast.
• On a panel discussion on little automation tools in Python on Episode 327 of the Talk Python To Me podcast, with Rivers Cuomo, Jay Miller, Rusti Gregory and Michael Kennedy.
• As a guest on Episode 264 of Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken’s informative and insightful PythonBytes podcast
• On a panel discussion on evaluating new open source tech on Episode 397 of the Talk Python To Me podcast, with Emily Morehouse-Valcarcel, Cecil Phillip, Łukasz Langa, Gareth Thomas, Dan Gerlanc and Michael Kennedy.

I spend some of my spare time serving people in need as an active member and 4-time past president of the North Durban Lions Club. I have also been privileged to be involved for many years at the Lions District level for District 410E, including serving as District Governor for the 2016 / 2017 year.