Steering Council nomination: Pablo Galindo (2022 term)

[pablogsal (Pablo Galindo Salgado)]

I’m nominating myself again for the Steering Council 2022 term. I am very excited about the progress that I have made together with @barry, @brettcannon, @willingc, @thomas and although I see many ways we can improve for 2022, I am quite happy of how we have managed the many challenging situations the group and the community have faced, from PEP decision to bootstrapping the developer in residence position and to things like trying to help with the communication in python-dev and for code of conduct enforcement.

Previous nomination for the 2021 term: Steering Council Nomination: Pablo Galindo Salgado (2021 Term)

Steering Council Agenda

Here are the priorities (in no particular order) I would like to pay special attention if I get elected for this new term:

• Improving transparency and communication: Although there are several challenges and is not always simple, I would like to try to find ways to improve the transparency between the Steering Council and the community. This entails fewer delays between the monthly updates and maybe more chances for receiving more direct feedback from core developers and community members, such as the events we normally held in the core developer sprints. I think this transparency is vital for the Steering Council position in the community and I would love to search for new ways to improve this with the other SC members.

• Performance: I am collaborating half of my work time with the Faster CPython project as I genuinely believe that this is something that will be very impactful in the different user bases that Python has. This work is not only very challenging by itself but has attached many considerations like the impact on backwards compatibility and other balances like the debugging experience. I think is fundamental that we have a holistic view of all these aspects when making big decisions that will have deep ramifications later. For doing this correctly, we need a very healthy vector of communication with different user communities and library authors to ensure we can do the work in a way that doesn’t impact important tools or groups.

• Developer in residence position: I am very proud of the work that we have done together in the 2021 term to bootstrap the Python Developer-in-Residence program and I’m extremely grateful for @ambv for all the progress that he has achieved so far. Is already patent how much impact this position already had in the core developer community and the general Python community so I will like to find ways to ensure funding for this position and potentially new ones in years to come. This will involve communication with the PSF and with potential sponsors, and we will need to ensure we have an excellent track to show that this is something worth funding.

• GitHub Issues migration: The GitHub issues migration has been a slow-moving project, due to many challenges and discoordination between different actors that are required for the project and we have spent a considerable amount of work trying to push this forward in the 2021 term. If I am elected for the 2022 term I would like to put special attention to ensuring the project is finalized with an optimal outcome. This has proven a very challenging area that involves a lot of coordination and communication but we have learned a lot on how to keep pushing this forward and I am quite sure that we will be able to leverage this knowledge efficiently for the new term.

• Minimize user impact when upgrading to newer versions of the interpreter (backwards compatibility) (especially important now that PEP 602 has been accepted). As a release manager, I am very conscious of how many of the difficulties many of our users and redistributors have when adopting new versions of the interpreter and this will be more and more challenging when considered together with the different projects that are happening (like the GIL removal and the Faster CPython project). I have found that coordinating my position as Steering Council Member and release manager has been very successful already when resolving some of the challenges we had in the 2021 term (like reverting stringified annotations by default at the very last minute) and I think I will be able to leverage this situation even more in the 2022 term if I am elected. Coordination, transparency and communication with user groups and redistributors will be a key aspects of making sure this will be successful.

• Improve the promotion and mentoring of new core devs and maintain a diverse and welcoming core development team. I think I can apport a valuable perspective on some ways to improve the promotion process given that I have experienced the process recently both as a core dev being promoted as well as a core dev proposing new people. Having a good process that results in people not losing interest on the long run is crucial to the survivability of the project, to a better reviewing and triaging experience as well as developing “big” new features. This process has been formalized a bit recently but I think it can be further improved.

• Improve the mediation in the communication channels: We all have been a witness to how complicated communication can be in some of the community forums for core development such as python-dev, discuss.python.org and discord. I think the Steering Council can do a better job trying to ensure that communication in these channels remains productive, civil and on-point. This may involve direct action or trying to find ways to find more effective moderation capabilities, but also ensuring that everyone feels heard and that they can communicate any concerns that they have in a respectful way, especially for things like PEPs where the Steering Council needs to take those concerns and other argumentation into account. This has already proven to be a difficult task, but I am confident we will find effective ways to improve the situation.

Although these are the main points that I think I can help with, I will be very open to listening to other people’s opinions on what the priorities need to be to adapt as much as possible to the current situation. I am far from knowing everything so I consider fundamental the ability to delegate and update views and priorities when the situation changes or new information appears.

Work as a core developer

• 3rd most active core developer since my promotion and 2nd since 2019.

• Core developer since 2018-06-06.

• Release manager for Python 3.10 and Python 3.11

• Recently focused on improving the user experience with the better error messages project to improve the error messages and general user experience in CPython. Examples of this work:

  • Python 3.10 better error messages
    
    
  • PEP 657
    
    

• My work is centred on the parser, the compiler, the garbage collector and the VM in general but I more or less work all over the place, maintaining also some of the CI bots (buildbot integration) and workflow.

• Several major improvements to the devguide, including the new Design of CPython’s Garbage Collector which has been very well received by many core devs and contributors and the guide to the new peg parser.

• Maintenance and improvements of the Python speed server: speed.python.org. This involves running automatic benchmarks, cross-validation and monitoring the different benchmarks in a stable and reproducible manner and open issues in the bug tracker if performance regressions have been detected.

• Add checks for ABI stability

• Maintenance of the buildbot server and the CPython CI:

  • Watch and monitor daily the buildbot server to spot failures, report them to the bug tracker and fix them (almost all of them if possible).
  • PSF blog post covering my talk about the buildbot work at the Language summit.
  • GitHub-buildbot server bots integration improvement to the GH workflow
  • Many improvements to the buildbot server as the new release dashboard.

• Added a new test-with-buildbots label to test a particular PR with the buildbot fleet. This has reduced considerably the number of reference leaks reported since it was added.

• Organized and hosted the core developer sprint of 2019 in London.

• Mentored and promoted several new core developers:

  • Paul Ganssle
  • Lysandros Nikolaou
  • Brandt Bucher
  • Batuhan Taşkaya
  • Ammar Askar
  • Ken Jin

• Organization committee of several conferences such as:

  • PyCon Spain
  • PyLondinium

• Authored & Co-authored PEPs:

  • PEP 617
  • PEP 570
  • PEP 619
  • PEP 657
  • PEP 664

• PEP-delegate for:

  • PEP 626
  • PEP 641

• Plenty of new additions to the standard library (I will not list them here to not make this post too big, but you can check them in the “What’s new document” of the different releases.

For more information you can check some of my endorsements for from my past nomination. Here are some of them:

Steering Council Nomination: Pablo Galindo Salgado (2021 Term)

I know I am already quoted in this post, but I would like to re-iterate that everything I said in my nomination of Pablo for the 2019 term still fully applies, and I am even more convinced than ever that Pablo would be an excellent addition to the Steering Council. I trust Pablo possibly more than any other person on technical and design matters, because he is thorough, dedicated and brilliant. If I could, I would have him as the default BDFL-delegate on all my PEPs — not because I think he wou…

Steering Council Nomination: Pablo Galindo Salgado (2021 Term)

I’d love Pablo to be the member of the new SC. I know him well personally and I’m always amazed at how much excitement about Python core development he has. He’s the kind of guy who I always envied: he has enough horsepower to plow through the most boring and unfulfilling tasks like maintaining CPython build bots and fixing unittests on archaic OSes. On the other hand he’s capable of doing some serious cutting edge CS stuff like implementing a PEG parser for Python. He’s also ambitious, knowledg…

Steering Council Nomination: Pablo Galindo Salgado (2021 Term)

“Me too” . I’ve collaborated with Pablo on a few CPython technical issues, and it was a delight. Most impressive: after resurrecting an object, our cyclic garbage collection would give up (it no longer had an accurate view of the object graph). This left all cyclic garbage uncollected, and could be provoked into a state where cyclic gc never collected anything ever again. I filed a bug report and sketched the vaguest of approaches to improving that situation. It caught Pablo’s eye, and …

Steering Council Nomination: Pablo Galindo Salgado (2021 Term)

I have been working with Pablo for more than a year now, and can say for sure that he is a very intuitive person in general. Always helpful and constructive on every subject. I really like to share and discuss any new ideas I have with him first, so that I can get a general impression about whether it would be a good fit for the language or not. His opinions and arguments on those discussions are nothing but very helpful and productive, which is the exact reason that I’d believe he would be an e…

Steering Council Nomination: Pablo Galindo Salgado (2021 Term)

I would also like to add an endorsement for Pablo. Though we don’t always agree, my dev experiences with him have been excellent. He’s smart as a whip and cares greatly about the end-user experience. I also think he would be a good peacemaker. Raymond

Online Presence

• GitHub
• Twitter

Conferences

Speaker at different conferences and meetups including PyconSpain, PyLondinium, EuroPython, PyConUs… I am intentionally keeping this short to not make a wall of text, but if someone is interested I can provide links to all the talks + publications.

Affiliations

I work at Bloomberg on the Python infrastructure team in London.

My time and availability

Although I dedicate a considerable amount of my free time my employer (Bloomberg) allows me to spend up to 50% of my time on Python.

If anyone requires more information or clarifications regarding these points or has other questions, I will be pleased to answer them or provide more extensive information.