Welcome our new Fellow - Natalia Bidart

The DSF Board and Fellows Committee are pleased to introduce Natalia Bidart as our new Django Fellow. Natalia will be joining Mariusz Felisiak who is continuing his long and excellent tenure as a Fellow.

Natalia is a Python expert with almost 15 years of experience working with Django. She graduated from the National University of Cordoba, Argentina, with a degree in Computer Science in 2007, and began her professional career in 2005 working for a Python startup before joining Canonical in 2009.

During her time at Canonical, Natalia spent over a decade as a senior engineer in the Online Services team, where she helped develop and maintain various backend web services, including the Ubuntu One File Sync service. Later on, she was promoted to tech lead and architect of the Snap Store.

Natalia has been an active participant in the Python community, attending various Python related conferences over the years. She has given talks on a variety of topics, including building robust software, with a focus on software development best practices and testing. Additionally, Natalia is committed to promoting diversity and inclusion in the tech industry and is always looking for ways to contribute to this effort. She is passionate about open source and believes that well-written code, documentation, and tests are essential to a project's success.

You can find Natalia on Github as nessita and on Mastodon at @nessita@fosstodon.org.

Thank you to all of the applicants to the Fellowship. We hope that we will be able to expand the Fellowship program in the future, and knowing that there are more excellent candidates gives us confidence in working towards that goal.

Finally our deepest thanks and gratitude goes to Carlton Gibson. Carlton is stepping down from the Fellowship after 5 years of dedicated service in order to focus on other areas of the Django world. We wish you well Carlton.