Steering Council nomination: Barry Warsaw

Python Help
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Nominated by…

myself.

Online presence

From the perspective of the Council’s mandate:

  • Maintain the quality and stability of the Python language and CPython interpreter
    • Attended the first Python workshop at NIST in 1994
    • Core developer since 1994/1995 when development moved to the USA
    • Worked with Guido and Pythonlabs at CNRI & Zope Corp
    • Release manager for several releases, maintained critical infrastructure back in the day, wrote lots of stuff for Python
    • 2014 Frank Willison Award
  • Make contributing as accessible, inclusive, and sustainable as possible
    • Mentoring new developers
    • Leading sprints at PyCon
  • Formalize and maintain the relationship between the core team and the PSF
    • Founding PSF member
    • Helped define the PSF and precursor Python Software Activity
    • Language Summit co-chair for several years (a forum interfacing between core devs and PSF)
  • Establish appropriate decision-making processes for PEPs
    • Defined and named the PEP process (e.g. wrote PEP 1)
    • Authored/co-authored 37 PEPs (of various types and outcomes)
    • Established the BDFL-Delegate role
    • Served as PEP Editor and PEP number hander-outer
  • Seek consensus among contributors and the core team before acting in a formal capacity
    • Spent ~10 years as core Python contributor and liaison to Debian and Ubuntu, building consensus between two very different communities
    • Lead GNU Mailman project, a large, free software project with input and contributions from many diverse groups of people
    • For a time, lead the Jython project.
    • Strong proponent of consensus-driven development
  • Act as a “court of final appeal” for decisions where all other methods have failed
    • As project leader and PEP author, I have lots of experience breaking impasses, acting in the best interest of the project and its users

Project leadership

  • Core developer since the mid-1990’s
  • Extensive experience leading projects, from the large (Mailman, Jython) to the small (dozens of open source libraries and tools, both 3rd party and part of the stdlib).
  • Early and ongoing advocate for Python 3 adoption across multiple organizations (Debian, Ubuntu, current employer, Mailman 3, etc.)
  • Release manager for simultaneous 3.0 and 2.6 releases
  • Language summit co-chair for 4 years
  • Experience speaking in public, and would be comfortable representing the project to the public

External factors

  • I am a Senior Staff Engineer for LinkedIn, working on the Python Foundation team. My day job involves maintaining the Python infrastructure at LinkedIn (e.g. build systems, libraries, applications, & services), supporting our Python users, leading the Python 3 transition, etc.
  • As LinkedIn is a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft, I often collaborate with other Microsoft core developers, working on problems that have a general utility to Python developers both inside and outside our organizations (e.g. importlib_resources and importlib_metadata).
  • LinkedIn allots me 20% of my time for working on Python
  • I expect there to never be a conflict of interest with my Python duties. In fact, LinkedIn is very supportive of my open source volunteerism and would never ask me to do anything that would be detrimental to Python or to my open source credentials or principles (not that I would anyway!). LinkedIn supports my nomination to the council.
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Out of curiosity, in this case LinkedIn counts as Microsoft company as far as the two limit goes, not?

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Correct, LinkedIn == Microsoft in the instance of the “no more than two members from the same company” restriction.

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Were you planning to add yourself to https://github.com/python/peps/blob/master/pep-8100.rst at a later date?

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I’m going to do it asap.

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I miss the bass player angle in external factors…

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I’m happy to say that I knew Barry was nominating himself but I would have nominated him anyway. :smile:

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