Mark Shannon and I would like to promote Tian Gao (@gaogaotiantian on GitHub) to the core development team. He is a skilled programmer, triager, and reviewer with a talent for reasoning about tricky issues involving tracing, profiling, debugging, and the low-level details of CPython’s complex internals.
Since becoming active in the project last February, Tian has personally authored over 170 issues and pull requests. He’s become the de facto maintainer of pdb and other related areas of the codebase, working through the backlog of open issues and improving Python’s powerful debugging experience in a variety of ways.
During that same time period, Tian has also been involved in almost 300 additional issues and pull requests created by others. Besides fixing and closing issues dating back to 2007(!), Tian is great at offering prompt yet thoughtful issue responses and PR reviews, both inside and outside his focus areas. We encourage you to click the link and choose a few issues at random; he has a real knack for quickly getting to the root of people’s problems, and guiding discussions forward in a patient and constructive way.
In addition to arguably knowing more about the implementation of PEP 669 than its own author, Tian recently implemented and co-authored PEP 667 for Python 3.13. This was a challenging project with a tight deadline, and he delivered… while also managing to fix a bunch of other things, including ten-year-old scoping issues in pdb, the same week.
Many of you had the opportunity to meet Tian last week at PyCon US, where he led a Language Summit discussion on the future of pdb and gave a separate talk about debuggers. He’s a great guy, and we both trust him to continue improving CPython for years to come.
- Promote Tian
- Don’t promote Tian
