2020 Election Campaign: Pim Brouwers

Who am I

My name is Pim Brouwers and I’m a Dutch ex-pat living in Canada. To pay the bills, I work for one of the largest professional athlete union’s as a Senior Software Architect. I focus primarily on data management, migration and integrity, though most recently rebuilt our secure internal communication platform, a majestic monolith with aggressive PWA capabilities.

You might recognize me from such open-source projects a Falco, a web toolkit, or Donald, a simple interface for ADONET.

Why I am running

Around five years ago, I had grown tired with the ceremony and necessary defensive style of object-oriented programming. It wasn’t that I disliked C# or .NET, just the code I felt it forced me to produce. I discovered F# one day by attempting to find a methodology to avoid the common excessive null-checking. It was immutable, expressive, terse and worked seamlessly with .NET. What could go wrong?!

Well, I struggled… a lot. Turns out that completely retraining yourself on something you’ve achieved a certain level of master at, is very difficult. Then one day, I happened upon the FSharp Org Slack channel, a community filled with generous & kind folks willing to help a complete stranger bludgeon their way through learning functional programming. It is because of this community that I’m here today as a very productive and more importantly happy F# programmer.

At the very least, my goal is to give back what I received.

My guiding principles as a board member are:

  • Help educate newcomers who, like me, don’t come from a scientific/mathematics/comp-sci background.
  • Dedicate personal time to maintaining F# libraries that people depend on.
  • Bring to the foundation the ability to listen and be open to new ideas.
  • Make my best effort to help make the community even better than it is today.
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