jessenoller.com

Pre­am­ble

There’s been some recent dis­cus­sion about DjangoCon(.eu | .us) and whether or not speak­ers should have to pay for admis­sion as well — see Chris Wanstrath’s (of Github) tweets (here and here) and this Con­vore thread for exam­ples. Obvi­ously, as PyCon is the “big dog” so to speak for Python con­fer­ences, every­one looks to “us” for a model to work from, or how we man­age things. I’ve seen a lot of poop slung towards the Djan­go­Con orga­niz­ers, mainly due to a lack of know­ing “why” cer­tain poli­cies (such as “Every­one Pays”) exist for Djan­go­Con, PyCon, and other conferences.

As co-chair and pro­gram com­mit­tee chair last year, and pro­gram com­mit­tee chair the year before, and now chair for the next two years — I fig­ured it might be good to take a moment to explain the ratio­nale behind PyCon’s approach — as well as some sta­tis­tics about the bud­get. I’m not going to state that this pol­icy is per­fect; nor that it won’t be changed; I also will not release the bud­get pub­licly — I don’t think giv­ing every­one a spread­sheet with­out the con­text of the hun­dreds of man hours of work that go into it is use­ful, at all.

Impor­tant Note: PyCon is orga­nized and man­aged by the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion — this means that, as part of being a 501c3 char­ity, some of the finan­cials from past PyCon is avail­able as part of pub­licly acces­si­ble finan­cial doc­u­ments of the foun­da­tion. You can find those on the PSF’s site.

The same rea­son­ing may not apply to a con­fer­ence that is orga­nized by a com­mer­cial entity or is done for profit. OSCON is a com­mer­cial con­fer­ence, so hav­ing speak­ers get in free is gen­er­ally expected. DjangoCon.us is in the mid­dle — it is orga­nized for profit by a com­mer­cial entity, but it also con­tributes heav­ily back to the Django Soft­ware Foun­da­tion. DjangoCon.eu is man­aged dif­fer­ently as well.

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Preamble There's been some recent discussion about DjangoCon(.eu | .us) and whether or not speakers should have to pay for admission as well - see Chris Wanstrath's (of Github) tweets (here and here) and this Convore thread for examples. Obviously, as PyCon is the "big dog" so to speak for Python conferences, everyone looks to ...

Intro­duc­tion

Some­time on May 6th — over two weeks ago now — I shot out a innocu­ous tweet ask­ing what might be a good blog topic. I think I said some­thing like “python, fam­ily, .…” — the over­whelm­ing major­ity of them responded with “write some­thing on fam­ily”, iron­i­cally, as I was read­ing those responses sit­ting at a stop light (yeah, I know — don’t yell at me) I got a phone call from my wife ask­ing me to come home imme­di­ately. You see, my wife is very, very preg­nant with our sec­ond child, and it’s not been an easy preg­nancy for her. We’ve had a lot of scares, and we’ve spent a fair amount of time in and out of our local hos­pi­tal — so when she said “come home right now” — you can expect that every­thing else pretty much evac­u­ated my brain except that.

I guess the twit­ter responses acted as sort of a cos­mic hint as to what was com­ing — the abbre­vi­ated ver­sion being that my wife, bless her soul, was deemed “high risk” and admit­ted to the hos­pi­tal on the 6th — with the expec­ta­tion that she would not leave until she gave birth. Fast for­ward two weeks in the hos­pi­tal, a myr­iad of tests, blow­ing out bud­gets on gas (what the hell) and being a “Sin­gle Dad” for most of that that time, and I can hap­pily report that mommy and baby are sta­ble, but still hang­ing out inside my wife.

These past two weeks taught me a lot about myself, about my fam­ily — some things that I thought I knew were brought to task and tested — heck, some of the things I was going to write about were put to the ulti­mate test. You may not really care about any of this — I’d go some­place else at this point if that’s the case. I do hope to out­line my thoughts on bal­anc­ing things (though I remain ter­ri­ble at it) and find­ing the time. You’re not going to find a cure all, or a hack that will “just make things work” — that doesn’t exist.

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Introduction Sometime on May 6th - over two weeks ago now - I shot out a innocuous tweet asking what might be a good blog topic. I think I said something like "python, family, ...." - the overwhelming majority of them responded with "write something on family", ironically, as I was reading those responses sitting ...

Pre­am­ble

A recent post on Hacker News enti­tled “Why I still don’t con­tribute to open source” raised a series of thoughts in my head — but then, before I could even take the time to gen­er­ate the small­est of replies, Brian Curtin swooped in and made prob­a­bly one of the sin­gle best com­ments in reply, and on the sub­ject of con­tri­bu­tion that I’ve ever read. The orig­i­nal post; and Brian’s excel­lent reply were enough to get me obsess­ing about this sub­ject again — eager to share my thoughts and feel­ings on it.

A while ago (almost exactly a year, oddly enough) I posted a ques­tion here to my blog — “Why aren’t You Con­tribut­ing (to Python)” — the replies to that post, both in the orig­i­nal com­ments, Hacker News, Red­dit and other thought­ful responses by Tim Golden, Yaniv Aknin and Brian Curtin made me sit back and think for a long time what we — as a “python core” team could do to help reduce the fric­tion and over­all bar­rier to con­tribut­ing to core itself. It also made me take a step back and ask myself why I con­tribute to Python — not just via core, but also to PyCon and the PSF.

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Preamble A recent post on Hacker News entitled "Why I still don't contribute to open source" raised a series of thoughts in my head - but then, before I could even take the time to generate the smallest of replies, Brian Curtin swooped in and made probably one of the single best comments in reply, ...

I — like most peo­ple com­fort­able with my rel­a­tively sane (yet lim­ited) knowl­edge of Python — rarely go and read the python docs except when I know what I’m look­ing for. For exam­ple, I have a win­dow open to iter­tools and col­lec­tions open a lot more than I care to admit (I love you named­tu­ple. I loves you so much), but I rarely go off look­ing for new things/stuff that’s changed.

For those few of you (and really, it should only be a few of you) who don’t know — Ray­mond Het­tinger is a python core devel­oper and author/maintainer of quite a few inter­est­ing mod­ules within the stan­dard library (and a con­stant stream of ASPN recipes). Ray­mond is also highly active on python-dev and other lists the sub­ject of this post being python-list (the one list I refuse to join just due to the time/attention tradeoff).

Oh, he’s also a cur­rent mem­ber of the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion board of direc­tors. To say he’s active would be an understatement.

Back to the sub­ject at hand: Docs.

Ray­mond posted some­thing I think should see a lit­tle bit more atten­tion — as I stated in my opener, many of us are guilty of not read­ing much in the way of Python docs unless we are look­ing for some­thing spe­cific. We miss out on gems/updates to older docs that really make them shine. We also miss out on new exam­ples, and other things that really help make Python’s docs some of the best out there.

As I said in my for­ward to Doug Hellmann’s “The Python Stan­dard Library By Exam­ple” -

The stan­dard library’s doc­u­men­ta­tion is good, and con­stantly improving/evolving. Given the size and breadth of the stan­dard library, it’s amaz­ing for what it is. It’s awe­some that we have hun­dreds of pages of doc­u­men­ta­tion con­tributed by hun­dreds of devel­op­ers and users that are used every sin­gle day by hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple to cre­ate things – things as sim­ple as one-off scripts, and as com­plex as the soft­ware that con­trols giant robotic arms.

In Raymond’s post to python-list, he listed some new/newly updated docs that are really interesting:

• Pri­or­ity Queue Imple­men­ta­tion Notes
• Search­ing Sorted Lists
• Writ­ing a Tokenizer
• A Beefed out cmd example
• Ordered Dict exam­ples and Recipes
• The new log­ging howto/cookbook
• A howto on sorting
• collections.namedtuple (I <3 this thing)

The newly added/revised log­ging howto by Vinay (author/maintainer of the log­ging mod­ule) is really good to note (You have vis­ited the python docs how­tos, right? It’s here.). The addi­tional log­ging cook­book nicely com­pli­ments Vinay’s revised log­ging mod­ule documentation.

Oh, and if you were won­der­ing — yes, there is an easy to read list in the “What’s new” doc­u­ment for 2.7 (curated by Ray­mond) that lists out all the new Python 3 fea­tures back ported to python 2.7 for your read­ing plea­sure.

Last night, an addi­tional resource popped up on my radar — pyth0n.org — a site, while need­ing some CSS love (oh, the CSS love it needs) is an excel­lent way to jump to just about any­thing within Python (docs, classes, meth­ods, built-ins, etc). I think I killed it with load from tweet­ing about it last night, so be gen­tle. It really is a cool site, it’s like a uber-index of Python.

As an adden­dum — Ray­mond has also become very active on post­ing inter­est­ing bit of python knowledge/pro­tips on his twit­ter account, which have been a joy to see pop up in my tweet stream (Given how guilty I am of say­ing things that might be con­strued as “noise”). Some of highlights:

• #python fac­toid: random.sample() auto­mat­i­cally chooses an algo­rithm, remember-previous-picks or remove-picks-from-the-population
• #python pro-tip: deque’s optional maxlen argu­ment use­ful for n most recent items, mov­ing aver­ages, slid­ing win­dows, tail­ing files
• #python pro tip: def mean(s): return math.fsum(s)/len(s) # don’t lose pre­ci­sion while adding large num­bers of small values.
• Dirt sim­ple map/reduce util­ity for #python:http://code.activestate.com/recipes/577676

So, take a look around the lat­est docs and fol­low him, and other python devel­op­ers such (Barry War­saw, David Bea­z­ley, Nick Cogh­lan, R. David Mur­ray, Guido Van Rossum) on twit­ter (you can fol­low me if you want). Brett Can­non (another core com­mit­ter) has a twit­ter list of com­mit­ters.

There’s been a lot of work done across the board to improve the docs, add to them and clean them up. A lot of excel­lent peo­ple con­tribute changes almost daily to them. They are a fan­tas­tic resource, and are greatly com­pli­mented by work like the Python Mod­ule of the Week (Doug Hell­mann) and other tuto­ri­als spread across the web.

If you know of a par­tic­u­larly good tuto­r­ial, or expla­na­tion of a mod­ule, you might con­sider sub­mit­ting a ticket cit­ing it, and sug­gest­ing it be included into the stan­dard library docs as well. What are some of your favorite doc­u­men­ta­tion gems, or exam­ples for Python?

I - like most people comfortable with my relatively sane (yet limited) knowledge of Python - rarely go and read the python docs except when I know what I’m looking for. For example, I have a window open to itertools and collections open a lot more than I care to admit (I love you ...

Intro­duc­tion

It’s been over a year since I was elected by the PSF mem­ber­ship to be a mem­ber of the board of direc­tors of the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion — this past week, I was lucky to be reelected. In that year, and even in the years prior to my elec­tion, I’ve long wanted to write down my thoughts and feel­ings about the foun­da­tion. This includes what it is, what it does and what it should do. You’d be stunned how many peo­ple — PSF mem­bers included — who don’t know the answer to these three things. Worse still, you’d prob­a­bly be even more sur­prised to find out many peo­ple who don’t think the PSF should exist — or even that it exists at all.

Before we start, I want to clar­ify a few things:

• What fol­lows is my opin­ion; and may be shared by some — or none — of the cur­rent 13 PSF board members.
• What fol­lows is not the opin­ion of my employer (not that I need to say that…).
• What fol­lows has no rela­tion or bear­ing on my role as co-chair and pro­gram com­mit­tee chair of PyCon.
• What fol­lows may be incom­plete, I reserve the right to amend or make clar­i­fy­ing statements.
• None of this is meant as a crit­i­cism of any past direc­tors, mem­bers, etc.

With that pile of dis­claimers done, I will state this: what fol­lows is my offi­cial opin­ion of the PSF and it’s duties and role in the Python Com­mu­nity as a direc­tor of the PSF — this means that if you are a PSF mem­ber, and dis­agree with what fol­lows, con­sider vot­ing against me when the elec­tion comes up this year. I will state that it is my goal to not only express what I think the PSF is, does and should do but also to pro­vide some­thing that:

• Helps explain the fun­da­men­tals of the PSF.
• Helps explain what the Board of Direc­tors is.
• Helps make the argu­ment why com­pa­nies should become sponsors.
• Helps make the argu­ment as to why you should donate to the PSF.

Much of what I will be writ­ing may be a sim­pli­fied or updated ver­sion of the infor­ma­tion that is also on the main Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion page. I’d like to note that this post has spanned sev­eral months of on-and-off writ­ing — and PyCon 2011 right in the mid­dle of it, so there is some infor­ma­tion shear as time passed.

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Introduction It's been over a year since I was elected by the PSF membership to be a member of the board of directors of the Python Software Foundation - this past week, I was lucky to be reelected. In that year, and even in the years prior to my election, I've long wanted to write ...

I posted the Python Men­tors — Python Core Men­tor­ship site last night. It’s pretty bare/minimalist (inten­tion­ally) right now — if there’s infor­ma­tion you think is miss­ing, or some­thing you would like to see, drop me a com­ment or an email. Feel like hack­ing on the source? Check out the bit­bucket repo — it’s a sim­ple blo­gofile site right now, and I don’t think we need much more for the forsee­able future.

Many thanks goes to OSUOSL for the free hosting.

I posted the Python Mentors - Python Core Mentorship site last night. It's pretty bare/minimalist (intentionally) right now - if there's information you think is missing, or something you would like to see, drop me a comment or an email. Feel like hacking on the source? Check out the bitbucket repo - it's a ...

So, after my ini­tial pro­posal to Python-Dev about the core men­tor­ship pro­gram I received a pretty impres­sive out­pour­ing of sup­port and inquiries from peo­ple — both men­tors and “stu­dents” look­ing to join into the pro­gram. Frankly, I’m floored at how pos­i­tive the response has been.

I got the mail­ing list up in short order (go here), and any­one who expressed inter­est to me, or on the python-dev list was directed to it — we have a total of 57 mem­bers right now, and many of the men­tors have sent intro­duc­tions to the list. We’ve also to hashed out the ini­tial code of con­duct, as well as pro­duc­tively answered questions.

Things seem on track — mod­ulo my inabil­ity to carve off time to deploy the small sta­tic about site to pythonmentors.com — on my task list for today. Just to share for your own edi­fi­ca­tion, below is our python-inspired (mean­ing: sim­ple, suc­cinct) code of con­duct for the mail­ing list:

The fol­low­ing code of con­duct is not meant as a means for pun­ish­ment, action or cen­sor­ship for the mail­ing list or project. Instead, it is meant to set the tone and expec­ta­tions and com­fort level for men­tors and those wish­ing to be men­tored on the list.

• We ask every­one to be wel­com­ing, friendly, and patient.
• Flame wars and insults are unac­cept­able in any fash­ion, by any party.
• Any­thing can be asked, and “RTFM” is not an accept­able answer.
• Nei­ther is “it’s in the archives, go read them”.
• List archives are avail­able only to sub­scribers, but sub­scrip­tion is open to everyone.
• Since the archives are “closed” — cross post­ing to pub­lic mail­ing lists is discouraged.
• State­ments made by core devel­op­ers can be quoted out­side of the list.
• State­ments made by oth­ers can not be quoted out­side the list with­out explicit per­mis­sion. [1]
• We endorse the PSF’s Diver­sity state­ment.
• The list admin­is­tra­tors reserve the right to revoke the sub­scrip­tion of mem­bers (includ­ing men­tors) that per­sis­tently fail to abide by this Code of Con­duct. [2]

[1] Anonymised para­phrased state­ments “some­one asked about…” are ok — direct quotes with or with­out names are not appro­pri­ate.
[2] All men­tors are signed up as administrators.

The next steps are to get the basic site up (noth­ing fancy) and to get a blog post up on the newly minted python insider blog. Oth­er­wise: I encour­age those look­ing to learn and con­tribute to join in, the water is fine.

So, after my initial proposal to Python-Dev about the core mentorship program I received a pretty impressive outpouring of support and inquiries from people - both mentors and "students" looking to join into the program. Frankly, I'm floored at how positive the response has been. I got the mailing list up in short order (go ...

*wipes the dust off the blog*

*cough* Now that PyCon 2011 is slightly behind us/me — I’ve man­aged to eke out time to draft and pro­pose some­thing that’s been gnaw­ing at me for some time — propos­ing a Python-Core men­tor­ship pro­gram. You can see the python-dev thread here, but I have also reposted the email below. I’m inter­ested in thoughts/feelings/feedback about the idea.

Hello every­one:

I wanted to take a moment to out­line another idea which came out of PyCon 2011 this year from numer­ous sources — a Python Core Men­tor­ship Pro­gram pred­i­cated on the idea that Python-Core, and Python as a whole would be served by fur­ther low­er­ing the bar­rier to entry of con­tri­bu­tion, and to pro­vide a pro­gram to con­nect new pro­gram­mers, stu­dents, women, and oth­ers to expe­ri­enced Python-Core devel­op­ers (Mentors).

Brett’s revamp of the Dev guide was part one of “secret plan to get more peo­ple involved in python-core” — this is another part, but I’m not sure of the num­ber­ing scheme.

The mis­sion of the Python Core Men­tor Pro­gram is to pro­vide an open and wel­com­ing place to con­nect stu­dents, pro­gram­mers — and any­one inter­ested in con­tribut­ing to the Python-Core devel­op­ment. This project is based on the idea that the best way to wel­come new peo­ple into any project is a venue which con­nects them to men­tors who can assist in guid­ing them through the con­tri­bu­tion process, includ­ing dis­cus­sions on lists such as python-dev, and python-ideas, the bug tracker, mer­cu­r­ial, code reviews, etc.

Addi­tion­ally, men­tors will assist in some­thing incred­i­bly crit­i­cal to main­tain con­trib­u­tor inter­est: get­ting patches through the process and actu­ally *com­mit­ted*. We all know — not every­one who is men­tor will have all the answers, so men­tors also act as con­duits to oth­ers who will have the answer.

The project itself will (hope­fully) be low in time-spent, and largely self-managing. We will start sim­ple with a mail­ing list (core-mentorship at python.org) where men­tors, and those who wish to be men­tored or ask ques­tions may do so. This mail­ing list will have a code of con­duct which will help pre­vent flame wars, or other coun­ter­pro­duc­tive dis­cus­sions — a code of con­duct also makes it clear to men­tors what they’re agree­ing to when they decide to participate.

The new list will also have a closed, members-only archive. After con­sult­ing with other core devel­op­ers, we believe it’s eas­ier to ask ques­tions when you don’t have to worry about Google pick­ing up your words from a pub­lic archive. We want to make this list a resource for peo­ple to be able to get started, ask “silly” ques­tions, and so on — our goal is to turn any­one who wishes to be into an active, sus­tain­able com­mit­ter to Python.

Men­tors will be asked to answer ques­tions — but also assist peo­ple in need of help with dis­cus­sions on the mail­ing lists and bug tracker (con­ver­sa­tions on which could have become con­tentious or stress­ful) and gen­er­ally to be advo­cates for the peo­ple being men­tored. For exam­ple — if a per­son sub­mits a patch to the tracker, the men­tor list may help them through ini­tial code reviews, or dis­cus­sions with other core devel­op­ers. The job is to act as an expe­ri­enced proxy for them.

The first step to this project is to ask for vol­un­teer men­tors — peo­ple who are will­ing to help answer ques­tions on the list, and gen­er­ally guide peo­ple as needed being as friendly and cour­te­ous and wel­com­ing as possible.

If you are inter­ested in being a men­tor — or have feed­back about this plan in gen­eral, please feel free to reach out to me (jnoller at gmail.com) directly. My goal, once this is setup, is to have the project largely self-managing, with the PSF help­ing to mar­ket it to the com­mu­nity as a whole.

Jesse

Update: We’ve launched, and we’re doing well — check out this post right here for more infor­ma­tion and the code of conduct.

*wipes the dust off the blog* *cough* Now that PyCon 2011 is slightly behind us/me - I've managed to eke out time to draft and propose something that's been gnawing at me for some time - proposing a Python-Core mentorship program. You can see the python-dev thread here, but I have also reposted the email ...

Whew. Where did the time go. I swear, it was only a few weeks ago when we were stand­ing in Atlanta together at PyCon 2010 laugh­ing it up and hav­ing a blast (albeit me with a busted ankle). Time flies. It really, really flies.

That said — as I stated on the PyCon 2011 blog, we’ve offi­cially announced all the talks and tuto­ri­als for the con­fer­ence this year:

• List of accepted tutorials
• List of accepted talks and panels

This year was par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult for the pro­gram com­mit­tee (the group in “charge” of select­ing talks) — some of which I go into in the announce­ment. We had so many awe­some talks, and an abbre­vi­ated time­line, a new site, the hol­i­days and a lot more to con­tend with. Look­ing at the pro­gram though, things look amaz­ing. Addi­tion­ally, we’ve already lined up one amaz­ing keynote speaker, and are work­ing on at least one other.

Not to men­tion — we’re lin­ing up an impres­sive array of spon­sors (yes, Nasuni is one as well) — if you know of a com­pany using python who might be inter­ested in being a PyCon spon­sor (yes, it’s totally worth it) — send them our way. If you have ques­tions — please reach out to us at pycon-sponsors@python.org — spon­sors get a lot of ben­e­fits, and they help out the con­fer­ence and com­mu­nity immensely. Remem­ber, any funds which count as “profit” for the con­fer­ence go straight to the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion.

PyCon 2011 looks like it’s shap­ing up incred­i­bly well — but it’s not going to be much of any­thing with­out you. Yes, you. PyCon isn’t PyCon with­out all of you in the com­mu­nity show­ing up and mak­ing it sim­ply the best pro­gram­ming con­fer­ence out there in terms of wel­come­ness, intel­li­gence and fun. But not only have we had to cap total reg­is­tra­tion to 1500 peo­ple — the early bird dead­line for reg­is­tra­tion is approach­ing a lot more quickly then you’d think! (Jan­u­ary 17th) — so you’ve got to get reg­is­tered!

Finally — get the word out, and vol­un­teer! We always need help spread­ing word about PyCon, and this year is no dif­fer­ent. We are also always look­ing for on-the ground staff and other vol­un­teers to help us when the con­fer­ence rolls around! Check out:

• The Pub­lic­ity page
• The Vol­un­teer page

Whew. Where did the time go. I swear, it was only a few weeks ago when we were standing in Atlanta together at PyCon 2010 laughing it up and having a blast (albeit me with a busted ankle). Time flies. It really, really flies. That said - as I stated on the PyCon 2011 blog, ...

Van says it all here — but I’ll quote it nonetheless:

While the pro­gram com­mit­tee toils away over the record num­ber of talk and tuto­r­ial sub­mis­sions, we are pleased to announce that reg­is­tra­tion is now open for PyCon 2011. Get your tick­ets early, because for the first time, we will have to cap this year’s reg­is­tra­tion at just 1500 spots.

Some­thing most peo­ple don’t know about me is that I am a data geek. So, being who I am, I have gone back through the sta­tis­tics for the past four years of PyCon to see if I could find any way of gaug­ing the health of the con­fer­ence from early in the cycle. I found that there was an almost per­fect cor­re­la­tion between the num­ber and tim­ing of the talk sub­mis­sions for PyCon and the final attendance.

This year, we got more talk and tuto­r­ial sub­mis­sions than ever before in the his­tory of PyCon. We broke the pre­vi­ous records by double-digit per­cent­ages in every category.

I shouldn’t have been too sur­prised. We started hear­ing peo­ple get excited about this upcom­ing PyCon eight months ago. To keep from over­whelm­ing our venue, we have decided that we need to cap atten­dance at 1500 peo­ple. We also promised that those who sub­mit­ted a talk or tuto­r­ial pro­posal would be guar­an­teed a slot, mean­ing that of those 1500 tick­ets, approx­i­mately 250 are already spo­ken for.

Early bird reg­is­tra­tion rates are effec­tive until Jan­u­ary 17. Reg­u­lar reg­is­tra­tion rates will run from Jan­u­ary 18th until March 1 — if there are any spots left. More infor­ma­tion is avail­able on the reg­is­tra­tion page as well as a direct link to our reg­is­tra­tion site.

Go here to register.

  Van says it all here - but I'll quote it nonetheless: While the program committee toils away over the record number of talk and tutorial submissions, we are pleased to announce that registration is now open for PyCon 2011. Get your tickets early, because for the first time, we will have to cap this year's ...