Vote to promote Erlend Aasland

Committers
1

I want to propose promoting Erlend Aasland as a core developer.

  • Promote Erlend Aasland
  • Don’t Promote Erlend Aasland
0 voters

I have been mentoring Erlend for more than a year and a half. This promotion is actually long overdue but unfortunately, this year has been very difficult to synchronize together to prepare the promotion and Erlend asked me to wait a bit when I last offered to promote him in August 2021 as he wanted to gather some extra experience and he had to sort some personal things. With this I am trying to say that Erlend has been ready for a core dev promotion for a long time and he has actually been acting as a de-facto core dev for more than a year.

Erlend has been contributing to CPython since 2019 and he has more than 270 commits in the main branch (even more counting maintainance branches and other related PRs) and he has reviewed over 210 pull requests from contributors. Although he has been doing other very valuable work, I think these numbers speak for themselves.

In particular, Erlend has been putting a lot of effort into improving and fixing the SQLite module, doing different very valuable work. His contributions here range from new features to fixing all bugs, to improve maintenance and modernising the code with the latest upstream developments.

During his contributions, Erlend has proven an excellent variety of technical skills, a very good eye for details, a lot of care for maintenance and backwards compatibility and he has been very responsive when some of his PRs have broken the buildbots or had unintended consequences.

Working with Erlend has been an absolute blast and I have enjoyed every moment of it and I have learned a lot from him as well and I am sure many other core developers had the same experience. I think he is as ready to be a core developer as anyone can be and I only regret not being able to promote him earlier :slight_smile:

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Post-promotion mentoring

As it was done in previous promotions we will continue to mentor him for one month after his promotion (if it’s accepted) to help him to deal with his new responsibilities, and we plan to require him to ask us before merging anything until he will be used to the process.

Vote process

As a reminder from PEP 13 regarding voting rules:

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.

13 Likes
2

Please, feel free to share here your own experiences with Erlend if you have interacted with him in issues, pull requests or otherwise. Having feedback from everyone is an important part of the promotion process and I think he will love to read your kind words!

Also, please share if I missed any important link of achievement. Erlend has been very active and I am sure I have missed some important things :sweat_smile:

3 Likes
3

I got very thorough and helpful code reviews from Erlend on the exception groups PRs. He is a pleasure to work with and I will be happy to see him promoted.

3 Likes
4

I have worked with Erlend on a fair amount of pull requests and tickets. He is a capable and thorough software engineer with an methodological approach to problem solving. I like the fact that Erlend double and triple checks all commits as well as asks for and gives feedback on pull requests. It’s a professional and consens-driven style. Overall he is a pleasure to work with and reliable peer. For example Erlend made major contributions to gh-90005. I couldn’t have untangled our configure file without his help.

Big +1 from me.

3 Likes
5

I concur with Pablo’s observations. Erlend has effectively been the core dev for the sqlite module along with Berker for at least a year. I’ve interacted with him occasionally when reviewing his docs PRs for sqlite, and it has always been a pleasant experience. There is no doubt in my mind about his abilities and I fully support his promotion.

1 Like
6

I worked with Erlend recently when I stumbled upon some of his SQLite PRs and helped to land them. He pushed some long-requested enhancements to completion and shows deep familiarity with the intricacies of the code. He should have been a core dev a while ago.

7

I also have co-worked with Erlend with quite a lot of tasks, especially for isolating module-related works, and sometimes I have chances to review SQLite-related changes.
His PR has always been submitted for reasonable changes, and he has also been shown actively writing PEPs when necessary, so I think he already deserves to be a core developer.
Thanks to Erlend’s contributions, I believe that SQLite modules become more advanced and well-maintained than past, and isolating modules for subinterpreter can move to the next step.

As someone who has always argued that Erlend deserves to be a core developer, I am very happy that he has finally decided to become a core developer.
I very much look forward to his future contributions.
Never have I ever wished I could have been able to vote twice for Erlend as much as this time.

1 Like
8

My regret is that sometimes I blocked his work, when I didn’t have enough time for reviews/discussions :‍‍)
Otherwise this is spot-on for my own interactions with Erlend, as are all the other comments above!

2 Likes
9

As Pablo wrote, Erlend modernized many C extensions by converting static types to heap types and by moving global variables to module states. It’s a tedious work. Erlend carefully reviewed his changes before submitting them, and listen to other reviewers.

When I noticed some issues about macros, Erlend conducted a whole study of all macros to identify problematic macros, and started a discussions. We ended by writing a whole PEP (PEP 670) together, and one year later, thanks to Erlend’s tenacy, the PEP has been accepted and is being implemented!

When Erlend reviews my changes, it’s common that he spot real issues, so I always appreciate his precious reviews! Before proposing a change, he also tries to look at what has been done previously.

It’s a big +1 for Erlend, I support his promotion!

3 Likes