I’m Elliot Ilya Simpson, an Auckland-based software developer and free software enthusiast.
Early life
I originally started learning Python when I was eleven years old, and attended the 2010 Kiwi PyCon in the Bay of Islands the following year, presenting a lightning talk on EasyGUI. This was the first in a trilogy of lightning talks I presented as a child. At the 2012 Kiwi PyCon in Dunedin, I presented another lightning talk on Pygame. I then went on to co-present a lightning talk on deploying a small Flask app on Heroku at the 2014 Kiwi PyCon in Wellington.
After finishing high school in 2016, I studied engineering at the University of Auckland, specializing in engineering science. During my studies, I interned at two companies, first at Workbench International, and later for Compac Sorting Equipment (now fully absorbed into the TOMRA conglomerate).
Career
At the conclusion of my studies, from which I graduated in 2021, I worked as a software engineer for Kenntec for nearly three years. There I built and maintained data pipelines to monitor fruit packing machinery, which I in turn used to generate invoicing for our customers. These computers were encased within the chassis of fruit packing machinery and distributed across the Bay of Plenty. Much of my time was additionally spent remotely accessing these machines for diagnostics and live support.
My next role was at Crown Equipment, the international forklift manufacturer. There I was part of a small team working on automated warehouse solutions. At this point I became heavily entrenched in microservice development, but also found the time to update our existing Python infrastructure and modernize our packaging pipelines. One of my favourite projects was replacing a poorly written third-party binary data parser and rewriting it from scratch using dataclass-style syntax which satisfied static type analysis and made for substantially more readable code downstream throughout our codebase.
I have since transitioned to a senior role at DataMasque, a New Zealand company which provides a data masking service (i.e. takes production data with potentially sensitive information and desensitizes it with realistic values). This has also largely coincided with the advent of agentic coding, and the resulting battle against entropy.
In the last few years, I have presented a couple of talks at the Kiwi PyCon, both in Wellington. First came “Python Package Management – Rye Is All You Need” in 2024, in which I explained the transition from ad hoc packaging and incomplete solutions to fully-fledged package management. The following year I presented “The Python and the Pelican”, which pitched a pet project of mine as a case study for how the process of bootstrapping large projects or deployment has become easier given modern tools like uv.
Personal life
Outside of my professional life, I am married and have two young children. While I have been involved in many hobbies over the years, including choral singing, acting, folk dancing, orienteering, and debating (to name a few), I haven’t the sort of time to pursue them now. Most importantly of all, I am an Orthodox Christian.