Angelo Dini, Switzerland. Head of Product at Divio, co-founder of devguard.

Angelo Dini

I’m a product person and developer, happily making things for the web since 2007. Below is what I’m made of so far, written up as a list of materials: jobs, schools and the things I do on the side.

01Part 01, the top cover. A to E are the sections of the list below.

ABCDE

My grandparents let me take apart VCRs, TVs and computers. They had no idea they were starting a career.

I grew up with them in a small valley in the south of Switzerland, below the Matterhorn. That’s where I first wanted to work with computers.

After a mediamatician apprenticeship I moved to Vancouver, learned English properly and did my first two internships there. Back in Switzerland I started as a frontend developer, and in 2010 I joined Divio. I still write code there.

Most of my work has had open source in it somewhere: django CMS since 2014, six years of running Frontendconf Zurich, and these days product at Divio, a Swiss PaaS built on Linux and Docker. I've been a frontend developer, a team lead, a product manager and now Head of Product, and somewhere along the way I ended up looking after marketing too.

A

Work

11 roles at 7 places, 2006 to now

  1. A1Co-Founderdevguard AG · 2025 – now
  2. A2Head of ProductDivio · 2024 – now
  3. A3Information ArchitectDivio · 2019 – 2024
  4. A4Product ManagementDivio · 2016 – 2019
  5. A5Team LeadDivio · 2014 – 2016
  6. A6Senior Frontend DeveloperDivio · 2010 – 2014
  7. A7Senior Frontend DeveloperUNIC, Bern · 2010
  8. A8Frontend DeveloperMaxomedia, Bern · 2007 – 2010
  9. A9FreelancerUniversity of Lausanne HEC · 2007
  10. A10InternshipElectronic Arts, Vancouver · 2007
  11. A11InternshipVisible Strategies, Vancouver · 2006 – 2007

  1. A1Co-Founderdevguard AG · 2025 – now

    A compliance platform that started as the tooling I wrote to get Divio through ISO 27001. Building it end to end (TypeScript, React, Next.js, Postgres, tRPC) was the fun part; incorporation and the first annual report were the educational part.

  2. A2Head of ProductDivio · 2024 – now

    I led the product strategy and the roadmap for Divio's Linux/Docker-based PaaS, from vision and discovery to delivery. Together with the leadership team we set a new "Agency First" direction, and OKRs now give sales, marketing and engineering one shared list of priorities instead of a weekly "who does what" debate.

  3. A3Information ArchitectDivio · 2019 – 2024

    Five busy years. The biggest piece was splitting the platform into separate backend and frontend, which opened it to new users and made room for a full UX redesign. In between came RBAC, free trials, better metrics and logging, the ISO 27001 certification, an on-call rotation the whole team could live with, security awareness training, and the company IT.

  4. A4Product ManagementDivio · 2016 – 2019

    Looked after django CMS and its add-ons: 20+ repositories and hundreds of community contributions a week. The interactive page builder and live preview came out of this time, and still run on thousands of sites. It was also when Divio turned from an agency into a product company.

  5. A5Team LeadDivio · 2014 – 2016

    Led a team of ten developers and acted as CTO for the agency side, working on projects for clients such as SBB, Post, Migros, LWL and APG|SGA.

  6. A6–A11The early years6 places · 2006 – 2014

    How it started: an internship at Visible Strategies in Vancouver, where I got to work on Al Gore's Live Earth project, then one at Electronic Arts. Back in Switzerland I freelanced for the University of Lausanne for a few months, built websites as a frontend developer at Maxomedia in Bern and spent a short spell at UNIC, before joining Divio in 2010 as a senior frontend developer. A few "Best of Swiss Web" awards came out of those years.

B

Education

3 schools

ItemWhatYears
B1BSc Computer ScienceFHNW, Brugg2019 – 2022
B2EF Master English for Media & ArtsEF, VancouverA C2 diploma (Cambridge Proficiency) and an IAM Web Design certificate, plus two internships that started my career.2006 – 2007
B3Mediamatician (federal apprenticeship)OPRA, BrigFour years of computer science, electronics, accounting and marketing, finished at the top of my class.2002 – 2006
C

Engagement

Teaching, open source and the homelab

ItemWhatYears
C1Frontend teachingPeers and colleaguesTeaching frontend to peers and colleagues, for about five years before it became a proper job.2010 – 2015
C2InstructorUniversity of Applied Sciences HSR (OST), RapperswilHelped set up the CAS Frontend Engineering, the first formal frontend engineering programme in Switzerland, then taught several of its modules and advised the faculty for ten years.2015 – 2025
C3Open sourceBesides django CMS, I've sent patches to django-filer, django-shop, Wagtail, Gatsby, HTML5 Boilerplate, jQuery, jstree and a few others, and briefly maintained or started some of them.–
C4HomelabAn ESXi box with ten-odd Ubuntu Server VMs. The posts about it are, somewhat to my surprise, the most-read pages here.–
D

Client work

10 sites and products I worked on

ItemClientWhatBuilt with
D1DivioSwiss PaaS built for AgenciesReact, Gatsby
D2devguardSwiss compliance platformReact, Next.js
D3Prezidjango CMS consulting and supportPython, Django
D4SBB CFF FFSRelaunch sbb.ch.NET
D5Zürcher KantonalbankNew ebanking and fx frontendJinja, Bootstrap
D6django CMSThe open-source CMS built on DjangoPython, Django
D7LWLRelaunch lwl.org and subsitesPython, Django
D8APG|SGAMulti-environment website setupPython, Django
D9PostActivityTeam activities for the staffPython, Django
D10FidelityEnterprise support and hostingPython, Django
E

On record

Things I’m glad I did, the languages I speak and what I do away from the keyboard

ItemWhat
E1Co-founded devguard and built its compliance platform.
E2Core developer of django CMS since 2014.
E3Ran Frontendconf Zurich six years in a row.
E4Helped organise DjangoCon Europe in 2012.
E577 articles on this site, mostly React, TypeScript, infrastructure and AI tooling.
E6A few "Best of Swiss Web" awards between 2007 and 2014, including Switzerland's best for sbb.ch.

Spoken

  • German · native
  • English · C2
  • French · B1
  • Spanish · A2
  • Japanese · learning

Off the keyboard

  • Guitar
  • Reading and writing
  • Surfing and diving
  • Fitness
  • Motorcycling
  • Farming