About
I'm Ben Sturmfels, a software engineer, business owner and free software activist from Ballarat, Australia. My blog here is a little heavy on the technology side, sorry! I do also love riding (push) bikes, flying kites, field hockey, (green) woodworking and growing vegetables.
I'm particularly passionate about a ethical approach to computing called Free Software and do my best to use 100% free software for my personal and professional life. In the past, I helped to start Free Software Melbourne and led the End Software Patents Australia campaign. I've presented a range of conference talks, workshops and interviews - some purely technical and other more on the activism side. I'm also currently the co-maintainer of MediaGoblin a self-hosted alternative to services like Flickr, SoundCloud and YouTube.
In my day job as a professional programmer, I spend a lot of time working on business problems and custom code for clients. I've written about some of these projects in case studies and articles on the Sturm Software Engineering website. I've also contributed to a range of public free software and open source projects including:
- Angular Auto Value
- Fabric
- Django
- Django Payments
- Guix
- Houdini
- Longclaw
- Miro
- OfflineIMAP
- Pelican
- Python Twitter Tools
- PyXero
- Saleor
- Shareabouts
- Tendenci
- Wagtail
I also maintain a few small pieces of software:
