Tibs
Product Advocate, Aiven
Based in Cambridge, UK
Tibs has spent most of their career as a software developer, working in digital mapping, embedded Linux, and backend cloud services. At the start of 2022, they moved to Aiven and Developer Relations. They've been working with data transfer technologies since the days of magnetic tape, contributed to data transfer standards in the 1990s, and now get paid to play with technologies like Apache Kafka®. They have attended PyCon UK since its inception, and served as a long time organiser for the Cambridge Python User Group. Pronouns are they/them or he/him.
Superpowers
- Python
- C
- Ruby
- Text markup
- Vale
- Sphinx
- PostgreSQL
- OpenSearch
- Kafka
- Terraform
- Backup
- FLOSS licensing
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Speaking activities
Past
PyCon UK 2025
Type text, find pictures: an app using CLIP, PostgreSQL® and pgvector
What would once have been magical is now becoming common place.
In this talk, I'll show how to write a Python app that takes a text snippet (like "cat" or "man jumping") and finds images that match.
- Watch the video of the talk
- Find the slides and source code on Aiven Labs
Sep 19, 2025 - Sep 22, 2025
EuroPython 2025
Explaining the 5 types of database and how to choose between them
What database should you choose? Worse, what kind of database should you choose?
My aim is to give you enough information to make that choice, or at least be aware of what the alternatives are.
- Link to the video of the talk coming soon
- Find the slides on Aiven Labs
Jul 14, 2025 - Jul 20, 2025
EuroPython 2024
How I used pgvector and PostgreSQL® to find pictures of me at a party
Join Tibs at EuroPython in Prague for their session "How I used pgvector and PostgreSQL® to find pictures of me at a party" and have some fun!
- Find the slides and source code on Aiven Labs
Jul 8, 2024 - Jul 14, 2024
Techsylvania
Preparing and Using Data for AI with LangChain and OpenSearch®
A version of this workshop, specifically created for Techsylvania, which took place in Romania, June 2024.
- Find the workshop materials on Aiven Labs
Jun 26, 2024 - Jun 27, 2024
NDC Oslo 2024
Building a movie recommendation system with TensorFlow and pgvector
Come build a movie recommendation system from start to finish, utilizing NodeJS, TensorFlow, and PostgreSQL’s extension pgvector.
- Find the workshop materials on Aiven Labs
Jun 10, 2024 - Jun 14, 2024
NDC London 2024
Building a movie recommendation system with Tensorflow and PGVector
Come build a movie recommendation system from start to finish, utilizing NodeJS, TensorFlow, and PostgreSQL’s extension PGVector.
- Find the workshop materials on Aiven Labs
Jan 29, 2024 - Feb 2, 2024
PyCon UK 2023
How I used PostgreSQL® to find pictures of me at a party
At an event, a photographer can take many photos. Which ones do you appear in? Find out how to search for faces using Python, OpenCV, OpenAI and, yes, PostgreSQL®.
Python ties it all together, and PostgreSQL's pgvector extension allows making SQL queries to find photos with my face.
- Find the slides and source code on Aiven Labs
Sep 22, 2023 - Sep 25, 2023
EuroPython 2023
Fish and Chips and Apache Kafka®
Apache Kafka® is the de facto standard in the data streaming world for sending messages from multiple producers to multiple consumers, in a fast, reliable and scalable manner.
Learn the basic concepts and how to use it, by modelling a traditional British fish and chips shop!
- Find the slides and demo code on Aiven Labs
- Watch the video (please note the corrections in the text below the video)
Jul 17, 2023 - Jul 23, 2023
Write the Docs Prague 2022
Beyond spellchecking - what else can we check automatically?
Writing documentation is hard, and spotting errors in that documentation is harder. Learn some of the techniques we can use in a docs-as-code approach to "lint" text automatically.
Sep 11, 2022 - Sep 13, 2022
