Nominated by: Paul Ganssle
With his permission, I would like to nominate Pablo Galindo Salgado to the Steering Council for the 2020 Term. This may be somewhat surprising given that Pablo is one of the newer core devs, but in the ~1.5 years since he got his commit bit, he has had a tremendous impact on many aspects of the project, and to me he seems like a perfect fit for the steering council.
Afilliations
Pablo works at Bloomberg (my former employer) on the Python infrastructure team in London.
Background
Pablo has been a core developer since 2018-06-06, and has been contributing to CPython since at least 2017, which is around when I met him. Since the very beginning, he has been a whirlwind of activity and many of us who have had the privilege of working with or near him have been charmed by both his intelligence and his empathy. Despite his relatively short tenure as a core dev, his accomplishments are too numerous to mention in exhaustive detail, so in this section I will attempt to provide a brief summary of some of the highlights that I feel make him most suitable to the position.
He has been very active in CPython development, adding many new features like os.posix_spawn
, math.prod
and the infamous PEP 570: Positional-only arguments. He also makes many less visible improvements, such as performance enhancements, adjustments to the grammar and the interpreter and bugfixes. In fact, since his promotion, he has become the 4th most prolific committer to the repository. He is one of just a few core devs who are true generalists.
Possibly more important than his contributions to the code base are his contributions to many “meta” aspects of the project. Most prominently, he, Victor Stinner and others do a great deal of work maintaining and improving the Buildbots and CI. This is an important but thankless job, particularly because it involves the somewhat unpleasant job of reverting changes committed by other core devs due to broken buildbots; by putting in place an automated or semi-automated system with clear rules for when reversions will occur, Pablo and Victor dramatically cut down the mean time to fix and have made the process more transparent and easier on everyone involved (more information can be found in this blog post covering Pablo’s talk at the Language summit, of particular interest is this improvement to the GH workflow).
Similar to his work with the buildbots, he has been working with Victor on speed.python.org, which tracks performance benchmarks for CPython. This is similarly important work for finding performance regressions, and also creates a record of clearly measurable improvements we’ve been making to CPython along one specific dimension. (As an aside, one of the most plausible ways I’ve seen to sell corporations on funding improvements to CPython is by showing benchmark improvements, because they often pay for compute resources and resource consumption improvements can actually be quantified in monetary terms.)
Finally, those of us who attended the CPython Core Dev sprint in London are probably already aware of how much effort Pablo put into it. Pablo worked with the PSF and Bloomberg on the details of the sponsorship, getting the guest list put together and general coordination (plus he found time to put together a little PR leaderboard to add a bit more fun to the sprint). This is just one of his more notable contributions to Python community events. He also has been involved in the organization of PyLondinium and PyCon Spain for the past few years.
Concluding Statements
The size of the Python project and the ecosystem that is affected by the decisions made here means that a lot is asked of Steering Council members. I believe that because of the breadth and depth of his knowledge and the strength of his personality, Pablo would make an excellent addition to the council. His knowledge of so many aspects of both the project and the community means that his input to design decisions would be invaluable.
One way that Pablo can make a unique contribution to the Steering Council is that as a relatively new core developer, he bring a different perspective to balance out the council. It is very rare to find someone like Pablo who can boast the he has both a fresh perspective on CPython development and a deep expertise in many aspects of the project.