Carol Willing and I would like to promote Savannah Ostrowski (@savannahostrowski on GitHub) to the core development team.
Since becoming active in the project over a year ago, Savannah has personally authored over 70 issues and pull requests, and has been involved in over 120 issues and pull requests created by others. She has been a part of the triage team since May, and has authored patches in a wide range of areas: the subtle C code required to handle jumps in debuggers without crashing, initialization and finalization of static types, doc updates for free-threading and the C-API, fixing segfaults in finalizers during GC… and those were just her first six contributions!
More recently, she has been invaluable in my team’s work on the new JIT compiler; without her hours of help, I would be struggling to get things in a good state for 3.14. In addition to authoring revisions to PEP 744 following community discussion, she’s cut the memory overhead of the JIT by over a third, tackled two tricky LLVM upgrades, worked hard to improve the stability of our fragile JIT CI, and patiently reviewed my inscrutable PRs. She also began triaging old argparse issues in September, an area of the codebase that she identified as largely unmaintained. She’s kept it up since then, even making time for the less glamorous parts of contributing: closing old issues, opening new ones, reviving old patches, reviewing PRs, and more.
Many of you have had the opportunity to meet Savannah this year at either PyCon US or the recent Core Dev Sprint at Meta. I first met her over three years ago when she interviewed me for my current position on Microsoft’s “Faster CPython” team. At the time, she was focusing on maintaining and improving the Python developer experience, a role she continues to this day in her current position at Snowflake. She’s a fun, smart, experienced Python and C programmer who also has excellent project management and people skills.
Most importantly, though, I trust her. She has expressed enthusiasm for continuing to serve Python’s users for years to come, and I’m confident that she will make a great addition to our team.
Although I haven’t worked with Savannah extensively, the time I have spent collaborating with her has been excellent. The recent JIT CI situation was especially fun!
I wholeheartedly agree with Brandt — I have full confidence in her abilities and trust her. I’d be excited to see her join the core team!
I wholeheartedly agree with everything Brandt has said about Savannah. Savannah is a builder who isn’t afraid to really dig into code (C and Python). She’s someone who seeks to understand and collaborates well with the core team and contributors. +1000
P.S. Thanks Brandt for being an awesome mentor. I’ve heard so much positive feedback from Savannah about your coaching.
While I haven’t been following her contributions super closely, she is one of the people whose activity I did notice increase the past couple months. From the contributions I did notice, I was surprised by their quality, and complexity, as they clearly demonstrate how much work and commitment was put into learning advanced parts of CPython. On top of the technical aspects of her contributions, everywhere I was able to see, her attitude has been nothing short of outstanding, and something I aspire to be able to match someday.
Outside project contributions, I have known Savannah to be friendly, considerate, compassionate, and an overall amazing person. All my experiences and interactions with her have been positive, and I truly don’t have anything negative to note about her.
Considering this, I am confident Savannah would be a great addition to the team. Not only would she be a super valuable addition when it comes to the technical aspects of development, she would also be a great addition when it comes to the social component of the project.
I had the pleasure of meeting directly with Savannah during the Core Dev Sprint at Meta, and we have interacted some times in PRs. I remember one PR where she was adding JIT executor invalidation to the eval breaker. Not only did she demonstrate excellent technical skills and a deep understanding of Python’s internals during that work, but the entire collaboration process was fantastic. She was incredibly receptive to feedback, engaged thoughtfully in technical discussions, and approached complex problems with enthusiasm.
Every time I have interacted with Savannah was truly a delight, and I believe she would be an excellent addition to the core team. Her track record of contributions speaks for itself, but beyond the impressive numbers, I want to remark that is clear that she truly cares deeply about this community and the Python language. I am sure she will be an excellent core developer.
I really don’t know how to begin this… but wow, thank you for all the kind words and support. Being part of this team means more to me than I can express. Python was the first programming language I learned when I taught myself to code. I chose it for its ease of use and its popularity in the geospatial community. What I didn’t yet know was that behind the language was a vibrant, welcoming, and truly special community. The group of people maintaining this project is one of the most inclusive and passionate teams I’ve ever worked with. Thank you to everyone who answered my questions and reviewed my PRs; I’ve learned so much from each of you.
I also want to specifically thank @brandtbucher and @willingc for their support, encouragement, and this nomination. Had it not been for Carol encouraging me to contribute, I may have never started, as contributing (never mind becoming a core developer) felt so incredibly out of reach. As Carol mentioned earlier in this thread, Brandt has been an incredible mentor. Over the past year, I’ve learned so much from him, both about the project in general and about that JIT he’s always talking about. I’m excited to continue collaborating on that work and to keep giving back to a community that has given me so much.
