After the meeting with core developers last week, we decided to ask Sam if he was interested in commit privileges. He is, and so we’re working towards that now. Hopefully you’ll be seeing some activity soon 
Given the magnitude of nogil, we felt confident in giving Sam Triager privileges right away. From this point on we follow the regular process.
Sam’s first PR is now merged, for an issue he reported himself back in 2016. We’ll be shortly moving on from easy territory as Sam gets familiar with the devguide, this PR was to practice the moves.