Draft:Tanya Janca

Tanya Janca is a Canadian entrepreneur, educator, public speaker, blogger, and streamer. Also known by her blogger name, SheHacksPurple, Janca is the founder and CEO of the We Hack Purple Academy, an organization dedicated to teaching about IT security solutions. She’s also the author of the best-selling book “Alice and Bob Learn Application Security.”

Education
Janca attended Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology in Ontario, Canada, where she finished her studies in computer engineering technology. In 2010, she passed her government-level French exams at the Alliance Française.

Career
Janca's career in the IT sector spans over 20 years. During that time, she has worked in diverse fields, including startups, public service, and tech giants such as Microsoft, Adobe, and Nokia.

Janca started her career in 2003 as a programmer and software developer for the Canadian Bank Note Company and later for the Canadian Federal Government. In 2018, she became a senior cloud advocate for Microsoft, specializing in application security.

Moving from big tech in 2019, she co-founded and became the CEO of Security Sidekick – a company that offers web application inventory and vulnerability discovery services. After a year, in 2020, Janca founded We Hack Purple Academy, where she's a CEO and security trainer. The organization focuses on teaching application security, DevSecOps, and cloud security.

In 2023, Janca joined Semgrep, a company specializing in IT security solutions. She's the head of education and community there and teaches about secure coding practices, static analysis, supply chain security, and application security.

Janca is on a team of advisors at NordVPN, Cloud Defence, Aiya Corp, and ICTC PAC. She is also a part-time faculty member of the cybersecurity consulting organization IANS Research.

Volunteering
Janca has volunteered as an educator and mentor in various initiatives related to cyberspace and its security. Starting in 2014, she began volunteering at the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) foundation. There, she acted as the Ottawa chapter leader and DevSlop project leader until 2020.

Since 2018, she's been a cybersecurity content advisor at the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC-CTIC). That same year, she co-founded WoSEC: Women of Security, an organization established to support a network of women who work or aspire to work in the cybersecurity field.

Appraisals
In 2017, Janca received usable security and software security certifications from the University of Maryland. That same year, she got the web app security fundamentals certification from Cybrary. In 2020, she completed the application security foundations program at We Hack Purple.

In 2023, Janca received the Difference Maker Award from the SysAdmin, Audit, Network, and Security (SANS) Institute.