Steering Council Nomination: Gregory P. Smith (2020 Term)

Why elect Gregory P. Smith?

I have been a CPython core developer for ~17 years. You probably know me as @gpshead on GitHub & Twitter, or gregory.p.smith on bugs.python.org. In person? I have attended the PyCon US CPython core dev. sprints since 2008 and all of the northern hemisphere autumn core dev. sprints so far so many of you have met me multiple times. “Hi!”

CPython wise you probably associate me with the posix subprocess implementation (3.2+) and its associated widely used backport subprocess32 that’s about to be happily obsoleted with Python 2’s demise. Long before that I created hashlib (2.5).

You’ll find me associating with gory implementation details. I want things to be better, faster, and stronger. Ideally without users feeling pain from a change unless absolutely necessary for the health of the ecosystem. At the same time I never profess to be knowledgable about everything. Ex: Put a parser in front of me and watch my eyes glaze over as I look for someone like Guido to help understand. :slight_smile:

This council is entering our post-Python-2 era. I don’t want that to be misinterpreted as another era of “break all the things” (not that I expect any of you to do that), so expect healthy skepticism of proposals that would cause serious maintenance and compatibility pain for our users without good existential cause.

Affiliations etc.

I work for Google on our Core Developer Languages Python team wrangling our internal Python runtime needs along with Thomas Wouters (also up for nomination I believe). Python is one of our most widely used languages.

I also love hardware. I find projects such as CircuitPython (and its origin, MicroPython) to be important up and coming stars for the maker world.

When I’m not on a computer or sleeping, I’m probably riding my bicycle.

Happy voting! :slightly_smiling_face: :ballot_box:

:duck: :heavy_check_mark:

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