I don’t know how well Dennis is known, but I’ve interacted with him many times.
He’s pursuing a doctorate in mathematics, so isn’t as obsessively 
active in Python-land as some of us are at times.
Dennis is bright, capable, sensible, and has always been a pleasure to work with. His most substantial code contribution to date that I know of was a first-rate implementation of Crochemore and Perrin’s
“Two-Way” subtle string-matching algorithm, which runs in worst-case linear time but with much cheaper preprocessing than other such algorithms require. I “mentored” him to a significant extent on that, but he really didn’t need much guidance. He quickly picked up the CPython coding style, and was very pragmatic & creative in keeping the best aspects of Fredrik Lundh’s previous string-matching code. And he showed great common sense by not going on to try to extend it to backward searches too: it’s quite an involved algorithm, and forward searches were the overwhelmingly most important case.
Beyond that, I continue to bump into him on the issue tracker and GitHub code reviews, where he’s always helpful. Most recently he asked whether I’d merge a PR of his, and I was astonished to realize he didn’t have “the commit bit” yet. I have every confidence in that the project would benefit if he did have it.
FYI, here’s his GitHub home (sweeneyde).
In accord with PEP 13, I’ll close the poll a week from now (a bit before midnight, CST, February 1)
It is granted by receiving at least two-thirds positive votes in a core team vote that is open for one week and with no veto by the steering council.
- Promote Dennis Sweeney
- Do not promote Dennis Sweeney