– UPDATE: I merged this message into the first message of the thead, as suggested by Brett. I chose to keep this message to not modify the history of the thread. –
Thanks @tiran and @Senthil for nominating me and for your nice and warm biography of myself!
I am working remotely from the South of France, so I am part of the European core developers
My manager allows me to spend (significant) time to contribute to Python upstream as part of my job. In my latest talk I even wrote that I’m paid full-time to work on upstream which is not strictly true (but it’s not easy to elaborate during a short talk which wasn’t about myself ).
Red Hat heavily rely on Python and has multiple products written in Python like OpenStack and Ansible to name the most famous. Making Python better and sustainable matters for Red Hat. There is also a general upstream first policy at Red Hat: fix a bug or implement a feature upstream, before considering to backport the change “downstream” (in a Red Hat package).
Online presence
My plan for the next 5-10 years of Python
- Performance. Continue to investigate options to reduce startup time, speedup the runtime, promote runtimes different than CPython, more collaboration between CPython, PyPy and Cython, prepare a GIL-less era (maybe at least replace the GIL with a lock per subinterpreter), etc. More generally be open to experiment new optimization projects/ideas
- Community. Detect earlier motivated candidates and mentor them. Write more tutorials and documentation explaining how to contribute to Python. Invite more active contributors to sprints and “core developers” events. Increase the diversity of core developers using positive actions. Detect issues to contribute to Python to enhance our workflow. More generally, continue what we are already doing well in this area.
- Sustainability. Discuss with the PSF to see how the PSF money can be used to sponsor Python development (ex: short “grants” to develop a specific task in exchange of regular reports), open the door to companies which have Python developers who have time to help (identify our priorities, ex: better Windows for asyncio, better TLS implementaton for asyncio), continue to organize sprint, etc.
- Maintenance. Sorry that item is less exciting but it’s just the boring reality. We have to fix CI issues, regressions, adapt Python to platform changes (hello macOS who decided to stop supporting fork without exec!), etc.
More generally, we have to ensure that Python remains competitive to modern languages like Rust, Javascript or Go.
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I experimented different projects last years to speedup Python:
I mentored or I am mentoring 10 contributors (I’m not sure of the exact number). I mentored Pablo Galindo and Julien Palards who became core developers (honestly, they were already mostly ready, I shouldn’t say that I mentored them!). I promoted the 5 developers as core devs (Pablo Galindo, Julien Palard, Xiang Zhang, Xavier de Gaye, Charles-François Natali). I also started to write a Tutorial to contribute to the CPython project (devguide written as a tutorial).
About the maintenance, well, I’m part of the Night Gathers who ensure that the CI remains green (tests pass) all the time (“Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death.”). Some people dislike to maintain Python, but well, I’m paid to do that and I’m fine with that (I was already “maintaining Python” before I was paid for that ).
Usually, I dislike talking about myself, it’s already way too much here, so I stop here and hide myself!