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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

*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...

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...

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...