Intro

Alicia Sykes is an accomplished Principal Engineer, and hands-on Engineering Manager specializing in front-end and full-stack development. With over a decade of development and leadership experience, Alicia has successfully delivered numerous scalable, high-quality solutions across a diverse range of industries. From fintech platforms facilitating over $1B in trading volume to e-commerce apps with millions of users, she consistently ensures impactful results.

Alicia is well versed in a variety of programming languages, frameworks and libraries (including Rust, Go, Node.js, Python, Java, Vue.js, Svelte, React, to name a few) and is continually staying up-to-date on the latest technologies. This puts her in the perfect position to advise on the best tools and technologies for any given project.

Alicia is also passionate about mentoring. She has a proven track record of helping developers grow their skills and take on more responsibilities, having led engineering upskilling initiatives for teams of up to 40 engineers, while delivering top-tier solutions for clients.

Outside of work, she's the maintainer of several high-profile open source projecrs, supporting millions of active users. Alicia is among the top 100 contributors on GitHub, and has crafted over 1 million lines of code. Her self-hosted applications have gained over 10 million downloads on Docker Hub, and have been featured in several industry publications.

A keen participant in the tech community, Alicia has written many guest articles, and has a strong following among the developer community, with 10k subscribers to her DEV.to blog, and many more across other platforms. As a regular attendee and occasional speaker at tech events and meetups, she is well known in the tech community.

Her contributions to open source and the technology community have been recognised with several awards and accolades. Including placing first on the Open UK Honors list, as well as gaining a spot on the prestigious GitHub Accelerator programe. Over the past few years she has won over large-scale international hackathons

Alicia is deeply committed to cybersecurity and data privacy, both for individuals and organizations. She actively participates in CTFs, and has responsibly disclosed several high-profile vulnerabilities earning bounties. Alicia has also developed several tools to help people take control of their data, including digital-defense.io, which sees 100k monthly users, and Awesome Privacy, the go-to resource for verified privacy-respecting software and services. Her work in self-hosting includes Dashy, with over 10 million Docker downloads, and Web Check, a security scanning tool used by thousands of companies worldwide, boasting 20k stars on GitHub. Through these efforts, Alicia continues to champion safer digital spaces and advocates for stronger data privacy rights.

Alicia is a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion in tech. She has led initiatives to mentor underrepresented groups, organized diversity-focused coding bootcamps, and champions inclusive hiring practices in her teams.

Away from the keyboard, Alicia is a keen sportswoman. After spending 10 years in the Army reserves, she still loves running, swimming and cycling, and and has completed several long-distance events for charity. Organising work socials, that can bring the whole team together for a bit of fun, is one of her favourite things to do. After work, you'll usually find her in the pub with friends and colleagues, chatting about the latest tech trends and sharing ideas.