Welcoming Microsoft as a Visionary Sponsor

Microsoft helps millions of Python developers achieve more by enabling Python support across products and services like Windows, Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft has been a long-time supporter of the Python Software Foundation, starting in 2006. Today, Microsoft employs several core developers working part-time on CPython and the Python Steering Council, making significant contributions as PEP authors. We are also excited that Guido van Rossum has recently joined Microsoft as a Distinguished Engineer and is exploring performance improvements to CPython.

Aside from helping advance the Python tooling and ecosystem, Microsoft has shown strong involvement with the Python community and has been a long-time sponsor of PyCon US, including four years at the top tier Keystone level. Microsoft’s support for the community extends to sponsorships of regional and international Python events including in emerging regions.

This year, we are excited that Microsoft is increasing their contributions to the PSF even further as a Visionary Sponsor. Microsoft’s sponsorship funds will be used to support the PSF with a focus on working with the Packaging Working Group on improving PyPI and the packaging ecosystem. 

You can read more about how Microsoft is supporting and contributing to the Python ecosystem on here.

Announcing six scientific Python grants

The Scientific Python Working Group considers funding proposals that advance the scientific use of Python. In the past these have most often been workshops and conferences, but we also fund project improvements and outreach. Recently, we broadened our scope to include developer sprints.

Our most recent call for proposals has closed, and we are excited to announce six grants to:

• Spyder for the development of online learning content for the Spyder IDE,
• Nicolas McKibben to implement MRI reconstruction algorithms in PyGrappa,
• The Carpentries to improve and maintain their Python curriculum,
• Qu4nt for translating the scikit-learn documentation to Spanish,
• Rosangela Mesquita for documenting common Continuous Integration practices for PyOceans, and
• Blosc for the development of a Python wrapper for their new C-Blosc2 library.

We look forward to reporting back on these projects in a few months.

Written by the PSF Scientific Working Group

Python Software Foundation Fellow Members for Q1 2021

The PSF is pleased to announced its first batch of PSF Fellows in 2021! Let us welcome the new PSF Fellows for Q1! The following people continue to do amazing things for the Python community:

Briana Augenreich 

Georgi Ker 

Twitter, GitHub

Joe Banks

Twitter, GitHub

Leah Silen

Leon Sandøy

Twitter, Website, LinkedIn, GitHub, YouTube 

Sebastiaan Zeeff

Website, Twitter, LinkedIn

Zac Hatfield-Dodds

Website, GitHub

Thank you for your continued contributions. We have added you to our Fellow roster online.

The above members help support the Python ecosystem by being phenomenal leaders, sustaining the growth of the Python scientific community, contributing to diversity efforts through PyLadies and other communities, maintaining virtual Python communities, maintaining Python libraries, creating educational material, organizing Python events and conferences, starting Python communities in local regions, and overall being great mentors in our community. Each of them continues to help make Python more accessible around the world. To learn more about the new Fellow members, check out their links above.

Let's continue to recognize Pythonistas all over the world for their impact on our community. The criteria for Fellow members is available online: https://www.python.org/psf/fellows/. If you would like to nominate someone to be a PSF Fellow, please send a description of their Python accomplishments and their email address to psf-fellow at python.org. We are accepting nominations for quarter 2 through May 20, 2021.

The PSF is hiring a Python Packaging Project Manager!

Thanks to a two-year grant commitment from Bloomberg, our second 2021 Visionary Sponsor and a long term committed supporter of the Python ecosystem, The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is hiring a full-time project and community manager for the Python Packaging ecosystem, with a specific focus on the Python Package Index (PyPI).

We are excited about the opportunities that partnerships like these can provide for our community and know that this one will serve as a model for what can be accomplished when organizations make investments in entire ecosystems rather than individual initiatives.

Bloomberg has been a Python Software Foundation sponsor since 2017. We greatly appreciate their support. You can read more about how Bloomberg is supporting the Python ecosystem, and why they’re interested in improving the Python Packaging ecosystem, on the Tech At Bloomberg blog.

About the role

Over time, the Python packaging ecosystem has grown to span numerous software projects, standards, and use cases within the Python community. This growth and specialization of projects has helped bring the Python community to where it is, but has posed challenges in coordinating important changes across the entire ecosystem. Major projects in the space include PyPI, pip, virtualenv, wheel, setuptools, twine, and packaging.python.org.

The project manager will oversee improvements and added functionality that will benefit all Python users while leading the development of PyPI into a sustainable service. Working with the PSF Director of Resource Development to fund work throughout the packaging ecosystem. This role will also serve as a community manager to solicit feedback and facilitate discussions amongst stakeholders in the Python packaging community to generate consensus and establish new specifications.

Over the past three years, the PSF has overseen work on multiple1 one-off grants in the Python packaging ecosystem, which were successfully fulfilled for improvements to PyPI as well as pip. While these projects have been successful, the PSF is committed to establishing a structure through this role to support such projects sustainably, and assessing the backlog of potentially funded work, as well as lingering demand in the community for further improvement.

Ultimately, this role will provide a basis for progressing initiatives across multiple packaging projects and taking on additional funding opportunities on a continuous basis and acting as a known point of contact for members of the community.

Interested in the position?

If you are interested, please see the job post on the Python Job Board for the job description and instructions to apply. The call for resumes will be open until May 18, 2021.

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1: Past funded work includes: MOSS award to finish and launch ground-up rewrite of PyPI (2018); Open Technology Fund contract to add 2FA, API keys, translations, improved accessibility, and internationalization to PyPI (2019); Facebook grant to implement automated checks for package uploads and PEP 548 in PyPI (2020); and MOSS award and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant to overhaul user experience and dependency resolver in pip (2020).

The PSF is hiring a Developer-in-Residence to support CPython!

The Python Software Foundation is happy to announce the creation of the Developer-in-Residence role.

The Developer-in-Residence will work full-time for one year to assist CPython volunteer maintainers and the Steering Council. Areas of responsibility will include addressing backlog, analytical research to understand the project's volunteer hours and funding, investigation of project priorities and their tasks going forward, and begin working on those priorities. An extension beyond the first year will be based on the documented priorities this role creates, available funding, and community goals.

Inspired by the Django Fellowship Program's success (https://www.djangoproject.com/fundraising/#fellowship-program), the position is the result of a 2019 decision by the PSF board to strategically increase the PSF's focus to support CPython by helping fund the hiring of a full-time employee. In the early months of 2020, the Python Steering Council worked on presenting a road map at PyCon US 2020 that would unveil this support. Little did we know, 2020 held different plans for us all! Regardless of circumstances, the group put together a recording outlining the Steering Council's priorities and how funding full-time support was put on hold (the talk is worth checking out!).

Fast forward approximately a year, we are picking up from where we left off! Thanks to the support from sponsors such as Google, this effort is funded for one year and moving forward.

The PSF is currently accepting applications for the role. The job post has been shared with the Python core developers via their mailing list. You can check the post via their public archive.