Python Software Foundation News: award

Showing posts with label award. Show all posts

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Brett Cannon wins Frank Willison Award

This morning at OSCON, O'Reilly Media gave Brett Cannon the Frank Willison Memorial Award. The award recognizes Cannon's contributions to CPython as a core developer and project manager for over a decade.

Beginning in 2002, the Frank Willison Memorial Award for Contributions to the Python Community is given annually to an outstanding contributor to the Python community. The award was established in memory of Frank Willison, a Python enthusiast and O'Reilly editor-in-chief, who died in July 2001. Tim O'Reilly wrote In Memory of Frank Willison, which includes a collection of quotes from Frank's insightful and witty writing. O'Reilly Media maintains an online archive of Frank Willison's column, "Frankly Speaking".

O'Reilly Media presents the Frank Willison Memorial Award annually at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. The recipient is chosen in consultation with Guido van Rossum and delegates of the Python Software Foundation.

Contributions can encompass so much more than code. A successful software community requires time, dedication, communication, and education as well as elegant code. With the Frank Willison Memorial Award, we hoped to acknowledge all of those things.

— Tim O'Reilly

In the open source community, project management is an often underrated skill: given a problem to be solved, and a proposed solution for solving it, define the concrete steps necessary to get a group of volunteers from the point of saying "We should do something about this" to "We have solved that problem".

Brett Cannon has repeatedly volunteered to handle project management responsibilities that have significantly improved the CPython core development infrastructure, from migration to a dedicated bugs.python.org infrastructure, to the initial switch to a distributed version control system, to the current adoption of a more automated development workflow.

Brett Cannon

Since he began as a core developer in 2003, Brett has dedicated significant time to ensuring that the design, implementation, and development of essential parts of the CPython reference interpreter are accessible to new contributors. He wrote the first versions of the Python Developer's Guide and the design documentation for the CPython compiler. He converted the bulk of the import system's implementation from C to Python, created the "devinabox" project to make it easier for new contributors to get started at development sprints, wrote the "Python-dev Summaries" articles from 2002 to 2005, and moderated the python-ideas mailing list since it began in December 2006.

Brett has served on the PSF Board of Directors from 2006-2010, and again from 2013-2014, and was PSF Vice President in 2006-2007, and Executive Vice President from 2007-2010. He is also a gracious ambassador for the Python development community. His thoughtful manner, genuine kindness, and sense of humor have inspired many at PyCons over the years. Whether helping a new contributor understand a code snippet at a sprint or encouraging a new speaker with his confidence in them, Brett shares his positive character with us.

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

2015 Community Service Award goes to Berker Peksağ

Last month I posted about the wonderful work of Terri Oda, who was recognized with a Community Service Award. Today’s post is about another 2015 Fourth Quarter CSA recipient, Berker Peksağ, who will be receiving a Community Service Award … for his consistent volunteer efforts with pydotorg in 2015 (see Resolutions).

As many of you know, pydotorg has been undergoing renovation for a long time now. It has been, and continues to be, a labor of love involving many people (the Python infrastructure team, Marc-André Lemburg, and Benjamin Peterson, to name just a few). Still, the work done by Berker over the past year has been remarkable, resulting in significant improvement to the site and to users' experience.

His contributions in 2015 include:

Helping get the second redesign working on the staging website
Working on the new job board with Marc-André Lemburg
Helping fix bugs on python.org (e.g., corrections to URLS for Python downloads; scrolling issues on landing pages and PEPs)
Making sure the site uses an up-to-date version of Django
Committing code to improve the user experience (e.g., adding a feature for updating board minutes on the site; making a change so broken images would not appear; updating the members' section to allow members to edit their profiles, and non-members to sign up; updating membership using django-admin so staff can download member files; updating the PEP RSS feed; updating Open Graph protocol on the website
Updating contributor documentation describing how to install the GitHub repo and how to contribute to the site
Improving the contributor experience (e.g., by switching from Chef configuration to Ansible)
Reviewing and merging community pull requests
Cleaning-up code

Wondering how Berker came to make so many awesome contributions, I asked him about himself and learned the following:

Berker is a software developer, living in Istanbul, Turkey, who first started learning Python in 2010. At the time he had been engaged in web development for over five years, but within a year of learning Python he built his first non-trivial Python project with a friend.

Desiring to become more active in Python, Berker discovered pythonmentors.com in late 2011. This discovery gave him the courage and support to contribute to CPython. As he tells it:

"I still don’t know what I was thinking since I [didn’t] even know enough Python at that moment :). I don’t remember all the names, but Antoine Pitrou, Brett Cannon, Éric Araujo and R. David Murray were really helpful. Brett also merged my first patch to CPython in early 2012."

Berker's enthusiasm and skills increased, and by 2014, he had become a core developer. Today he works as a Python consultant in Istanbul.

I asked Berker what more needs to be done on pydotorg, and he replied

"Our stack is little bit outdated (Python 3.3 and Django 1.7), and we have a few blockers before switching to the latest releases of Python and Django. We also need to improve community contributions. I have a few ideas, but I couldn’t find enough time to work on them."

So here’s an opportunity for those of you who would like to help! And for everyone, please join me in congratulating Berker on his well-deserved award and in thanking him for his contributions to our community.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

Monday, August 31, 2015

CSA Awards to Tollervey, Stinner, and Storchaka

Greetings Readers,

I apologize for the hiatus I’ve taken recently from writing this blog -- other commitments temporarily got in the way. But during this time the PSF has been hard at work, and I intend to catch you up on their activities in the next few posts.

First of all, the Community Service Awards have been given out for both the second and third quarters of 2015. I am extremely happy to announce that the second quarter award went to our good friend, Nicholas Tollervey, for his excellent work in education and outreach. You can read more about Nick in a recent previous post to this blog (Tollervey), so I’ll forgo saying more about him here, other than congratulations, and will turn to telling you about our third quarter award recipients.

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation award the 2015 3rd Quarter Community Service Award to Victor Stinner and Serhiy Storchaka (PSF CSA).

Both Stinner and Storchaka are extremely active Python core developers. In the past three years, Serhiy has contributed well over 2000 commits, while Victor comes in a close second with almost 2000. Their hard work and dedication have helped increase Python’s vitality, relevance, and amazing growth -- a fact that the PSF wishes to recognize with this award.

In addition, Serhiy Storchaka is active on the Python tracker, taking the time to help other contributors by reviewing and committing their patches.

Victor Stinner’s work additionally includes 20 PEPs (see PEPs) as well as active participation in the Python community. You can view his PyCon 2014 talk here. He is also one of the developers of the tulip/asyncio project which provides asynchronous I/O support to Python. It was Victor who ported tulip/asyncio to Python 2; its usefulness has resulted in its recently being included as part of the Python 3.4 standard library.

Victor Stinner

Please join me in congratulating our latest CSA recipients and in thanking them for their important work.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Jessica McKellar receives 2015 Frank Willison Award

Ask any Pythonista to name the best features of Python and they are sure to include its amazing community. For the past 15 years the PSF has recognized this important feature with its Community Service Awards and with a special annual award for outstanding contributions to the Python Community–the Frank Willison Award.

I am extremely happy to report that this year’s Frank Willison Award was presented at OSCON 2015 to Jessica McKellar (see Award Ceremony).

Jessica sharing her knowledge and skills

According to the PSF,

Jessica McKellar has served in many distinguished roles within the Python community: Director, Python Software Foundation; PyCon Diversity Outreach Chair; core organizer of Boston Python, one of Python’s largest user groups; frequent keynote speaker and tutorial presenter; board member of OpenHatch; Boston Python Workshop organizer and evangelist; PSF Fellow; mentor for Outreachy program; core contributor to OpenHatch and Twisted projects. She also has a long history as a Python advocate, as a book author (Twisted Network Programming), training author (Introduction to Python), startup founder, VP of Engineering, and MIT alumna in Computer Science.

Jessica’s tireless dedication to outreach and education created fundamental change in the Python community. In 2011, only 1% of talks given at PyCon were presented by women. Jessica’s outreach efforts included hundreds of individually targeted emails to women in technology, encouraging women to submit talk proposals, and mentoring many through the entire proposal process. In 2014 and 2015, a full 33% of talks at PyCon were given by women.

As a volunteer with genuine commitment to the education and success of others, Jessica spends a significant amount of her time on outreach, encouraging new leaders in the Python community, and sharing how Python education empowers others to change the world. She has touched many Python community members, directly and indirectly, with her grace, intelligence, and humble willingness to listen, collaborate, and celebrate the contributions of others.

The award is a memorial to the legacy of O'Reilly editor-in-chief, Frank Willison, who died in 2001. Author of the column Frankly Speaking, Willison shared his enthusiasm for programming, open-source, and, in particular, Python with his many appreciative readers. His writings and witticisms can be found at O'Reilly Archives and In Memory.

Previous recipients of this prestigious award were:

Barry Warsaw (2014)
Anna Martelli Ravenscroft (2013)
Jesse Noller (2012)
Georg Brandl (2011)
Christian Tismer (2010)
Mark Hammond (2009)
Martin von Löwis (2008)
Steve Holden (2007)
Alex Martelli (2006)
Cameron Laird (2004)
Fredrik Lundh (2003)
Andrew Kuchling (2002)

Please join me in congratulating Jessica McKellar on her well-deserved award and thanking her for her numerous contributions.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

CSA goes to PSF Brochure Creators

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation award Armin Stross-Radschinski and Jan Ulrich Hasecke the 1st Qtr 2015 PSF Community Service Award for their work on creating the PSF Python Brochure.

For the last several years, a dedicated team has toiled in obscurity on a task they knew to be important for the future of a programming language they loved, but at the same time, one that many thought would be a fool’s errand and would never pay off. These intrepid visionaries kept going, through thick and thin; through difficulties getting stories, legal permissions, and sponsors; through naysayers and those who said, again and again, that it was useless, since winter is coming (or something similar); through lions, and tigers and . . . ! Ultimately, they produced (drumroll, please) the PSF Brochure!

All kidding aside, the PSF brochure took an enormous amount of work and has been a huge success. It stands as a real-world ambassador for Python, for which we should all be grateful, and of which we should all be aware and proud! The next time one of your relatives, or friend of a friend, or a new acquaintance asks "so why is this open source language you’re spending so much time on such a big deal?" (see fn.* below), you needn’t break a sweat explaining; just hand them the brochure.

And beyond saving individual Pythonistas a lot of time and effort, the brochure, more importantly, conveys to “CIOs and chief developers, scientists and programmers, university lecturers, teachers and students, customers, clients, managers and employees” the benefits, functions, uses, applications, advantages, features, potential, and ease of using Python.

Armin worked on the design and layout of the brochure, managed the visual aspects of the project, getting the sponsor ads into the brochure, managing the print runs, the project support website, ordering system, payment system, and finally all the shipping of the brochures to various conferences and user groups around the world.

Jan Ulrich was the main editor of the brochure content and worked with the sponsor story authors to create interesting stories. He also wrote the editorial parts of the brochure: the intro and the import success sections.

They both also helped with finding good success stories and sponsors, a task which took more time and effort than originally anticipated. According to PSF Director, Marc-Andre Lemburg, who headed up the project,

Armin and Jan Ulrich both put a huge amount of work into the creation of the brochure. Armin on the visual and production side, Jan Ulrich on the editorial and content side. Without their efforts and passion, we would not have succeeded running this four year project to completion.”

You can find more information about the project on the wiki page, the support website, and by reading previous posts to this blog: PSF Brochure, Brochure Sold Out.

footnote*: a real question really asked by real relatives!

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Read the Docs: growing with a little help from its friends at the PSF (and elsewhere)

Today's post, like the previous one, features a development project that the PSF has been delighted to fund once again this year.

On April 28, 2015, the PSF Board unanimously approved the following resolution:

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation grant $8,000 to Read the Docs, Inc. for developmental work.

What is RTD?

Looking for somewhere to host your open source project’s documentation in a way that will make it readily available, easy to find, fully searchable for your users, and exportable in PDF format, while at the same time offering you ease of use and the ability to add content as your project develops? Then, you’ll want to check out Read the Docs, the world’s largest documentation website for open source projects.

Read the Docs

… hosts documentation, making it fully searchable and easy to find. You can import your docs using any major version control system, including Mercurial, Git, Subversion, and Bazaar. We support webhooks so your docs get built when you commit code. There’s also support for versioning so you can build docs from tags and branches of your code in your repository.

RTD’s History

RTD was created in 2010 by Eric Holscher, Charles Leifer, and Bobby Grace for the 2010 Django Dash. Eric tells the interesting story at Djangocon. A Django Dash is a coding contest that allows 48 hours for development and implementation of a project. Eric and his team considered what to do and decided that, since current documentation hosting was less than satisfactory, they could be of most help to the community by creating a web-based doc hosting solution. They agreed that Sphinx was the best document tool for Python, so they went with that.

According to Eric, 2011 was the year that saw RTD go … from a hobby project, into something projects depended on. At that point, they were hosting documentation for Celery, Fabric, Nose, py.test, Virtualenv, Pip, Django CMS, Django, Grapelli/Floppyforms/Sentry, mod_wsgi. Currently, they are hosting what Eric describes as a decent part of the Python ecosystem, including SQL Academy, Pyramid, Requests, Minecraft Overviewer, and many others. They have over 50 contributors, 7500 users, and get over 15,000,000 pageviews a month. The code for RTD is on GitHub and its documentation can be found on the site. Rackspace provides free hosting. A full list of features is available on the site.

Photo Credit: Aaron Hockley, October 2014

Creative Commons license 2.00

Use of PSF Grant

The PSF award was part of a fundraising drive that opened at PyCon 2015 and brought in $24,000 USD from 157 contributions since then (see the RTD Blog). Corporate sponsors included Twilio, Sentry, DreamHost, and Lincoln Loop; with service sponsorships from Elastic Search, MaxCDN, and Gandi.

This funding will support RTD for 3 months of development work on the path toward sustainability as an open source project. More specifically, the funds will allow RTD to hire 2 part-time paid positions: Community Developer and Operations Developer (see RTD Blogpost for details and how to apply).

Furthermore, RTD intends to document its use of PSF grant money; how development time is spent and how funds are allocated will be posted on RTD’s public Trello board.

If you’d like to help, you can contribute to RTD at Gratipay and you can follow them on Twitter.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

Monday, March 25, 2013

Congratulations to Fernando Perez, Recipient of FSF’s Advancement of Free Software Award

On Saturday March 23, Dr. Fernando Perez was presented the Free Software Foundation’s annual Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his work on IPython. The award “is given annually to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software.”

Fernando, who was elected to the PSF in 2010, received the award at LibrePlanet 2013, which took place at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He dedicated the award to the late John Hunter, creator of matplotlib, who passed away last August. John was posthumously awarded the Foundation’s Distinguished Service Award.

The Foundation congratulates Fernando on his great work on IPython and his efforts all around the community!

For more information, see the FSF’s announcement: https://www.fsf.org/news/2012-free-software-award-winners-announced-2

Friday, September 14, 2012

Announcing the 2012 Distinguished Service Award - John Hunter

The Distinguished Service Award

The Python Software Foundation voted unanimously on September 12, 2012 to authorize the creation of a new award: the Distinguished Service Award. The award is offered in recognition of long-term excellence in the Python community, and is intended to stand as the Foundation's highest honor. Whether for contributions of code, activism, evangelism, or for other services to Python and its global community, the Foundation seeks to honor those who have a record of sustained and prolific giving to the Python world.

The award will not be made to a schedule, but as deserving candidates emerge. It comes with a check for $5,000, in simple recognition of the kind of devoted service for which the award will be presented.

Full details of the award, and a list of recipients, can be found on the Foundation's awards page.

The First Recipient

The inaugural recipient of the Distinguished Service Award is John Hunter, who passed away on August 28, 2012 after losing an all-too-brief battle with colon cancer.

He is survived by his wife Miriam and three daughters Clara, Ava, and Rahel. To mark his passing, the NumFOCUS Foundation has setup a memorial fund for the care and education of his three daughters at http://numfocus.org/johnhunter/.

John Hunter

There are few projects in the Python world which have enjoyed the reach, longevity, and value that matplotlib has offered in the 10 years since its creation. John Hunter, at the time a post-doctoral neurobiologist at the University of Chicago, started the matplotlib library as a way to work around downtime created by limited licensing for expensive proprietary tools. His choice to use Python was a bold one at the time, given Python's relatively young age, especially within the sciences. However, his efforts paid off and he was able to create an open alternative to allow him to continue analyzing epileptic seizure data in children without the limitations he was experiencing with other products.

Over time, John left the academic world and entered Chicago's finance industry, taking employment at TradeLink Securities. While there, he took his science background and matplotlib project into the field of quantitative analysis. In the ten years since matplotlib's creation, John brought three daughters into the world and cared for his family all while maintaining the number one spot on the matplotlib committer list. He became further involved in the numeric and scientific communities, presenting at conferences and expanding his involvement to the recently formed NumFOCUS Foundation, at which he was a founding board member.

John's creation and contribution of matplotlib to not just the Python community, but to the science and mathematics communities, is truly an effort that will live on and continue to influence these communities and more for many years to come. Whether you found Python through matplotlib or matplotlib through Python, John Hunter's efforts have left a lasting mark on so many people in so many places.

In addition to the Distinguished Service Award, the Foundation will be contributing $3500 to a project which is currently in the works, the John Hunter Technical Fellowship. More details on this will follow.

Monday, October 17, 2011

2011 Frank Willison Memorial Award

The 2011 Frank Willison Memorial Award for Services to the Python Community has been awarded to Georg Brandl.

Georg has been a core contributor to CPython since 2005, contributing bug fixes for compiler internals and modules such as pdb. His most widely known contributions are to Python's documentation, through writing as well as by creating and maintaining the Sphinx tool chain for converting reStructuredText input files to more easily consumed formats such as HTML and PDF.

The video announcing Georg's award at OSCON 2011 is available on YouTube.

Making Documentation Easier

Earlier versions of Python used LaTeX and a Perl-based tool-chain to convert documentation into HTML and PDF. The reliance on Perl, and the relative difficulty of contributing to LaTeX-formatted source files, came up from time to time, but Georg was the one to finally take on the problem of building the necessary tools to manage the content in another format, and then converting all of the existing files.

Georg studied the docutils project and decided that it met most of the requirements, but needed a few custom markup features and a tool to convert individual input files to a unified output document. He wrote a tool called "doctools" for Python's documentation, which was eventually re-christened to Sphinx "because of the build tool for python.org, which was called Pyramid -- and unhappily without regard to the two existing projects called Sphinx."

Over time, the user base for Sphinx grew beyond CPython's documentation team, and Georg continues to work with other contributors to make it more generally useful for other projects. For example, some of the Python-centric features have been reorganized with the recent addition of the "domains" system, allowing Sphinx to be used for projects written in C, Java, and other languages just as easily as Python.

When I asked him about Sphinx, Georg said,

Today I'm very happy and very proud of what the community has done for documentation, also thanks to Sphinx: while Python itself always had excellent docs, now extensive and usable docs are basically a trademark of the whole Python community (just look at ReadTheDocs or packages.python.org).

About Georg

Georg is a PhD student of Physics. He works at the Munich research reactor slash neutron source on magnetism, researching novel materials for the computing of tomorrow. He uses Python to control experiments consisting of dozens of individual devices, and for teaching other scientists how to do so efficiently. When he is not working on Python-related projects, Georg likes to cycle and to cook.

About the Award

Since 2002, O'Reilly Media has presented the Frank Willison Award for Contributions to the Python Community to someone who has done outstanding work for the Python community. The award was established in memory of Frank Willison, a Python enthusiast and O'Reilly editor-in-chief, who died in July 2001. Previous recipients include Christian Tismer (2010), Martin von Löwis (2008), and Steve Holden (2007).

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Frank Willison Memorial Award Recipient Selected

The 2010 Frank Willison Memorial Award for Services to the Python Community has been awarded to Christian Tismer.

Christian's contributions to the technology behind Python have focused on performance. For example, he is the founder of the Stackless Python project, a micro-threading system with the first implementation of generators and continuations. You can learn more about Stackless from the project's history page and this IBM developerWorks interview with Christian by David Mertz.

Christian also co-founded PyPy, an implementation of Python in Python, with Armin Rigo and Holger Krekel. Christian worked on PyPy full time for a period, using EU funding. Later, he worked on the JIT compiler Psyco with Raymond Hettinger to create Psyco V2. Most recently, he has been employed by CCP Games to work on combining Stackless and Psyco and updating them to support 64-bit systems.

In 1997, as one of his earliest contributions to the Python community, Christian launched the Starship Python website. That was a time when setting up your own server online required considerable effort, and hosting services were nascent and expensive. Starship filled an important gap as a free playground and hosting site for Python programmers. Members of the Python Software Activity (the forerunner of the PSF) were given preference when requesting accounts on the Starship, which had the effect of increasing membership in the PSA from 60 to 300

The Starship site was quite popular (by 2000 it had over 250 "crew members"), and moved several times, with several other volunteers helping with the system administration. Old versions of the site are available through the Internet Archive Way Back Machine. A revived version is running on one of Christian's servers now, but because hosting services are much easier to find today, he is looking for another concept to give it a renewed purpose.

When he's not working on Python, Christian enjoys watching movies, reading, and practicing playing piano. You can follow him on twitter @ctismer.

About the Award

More details about the award, including a complete list of past recipients, are available on the Python web site at http://www.python.org/community/awards/frank-willison/

Updated: The award is for 2010, not 2009.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

2010 Q2 Community Service Award Nominations

The Python Software Foundation is soliciting nominations for the second quarter 2010 community awards.

The PSF Community Awards are a way for the PSF Board of Directors to recognize contributions by community members that significantly improve the Foundation's fulfillment of its mission and benefits the broader Python community.

Recognition takes the form of an award certificate plus one of the following:

A cash award of $500; or

Free registration at PyCon, with optionally a contribution of up to $500 towards the recipient's travel and accommodation expenses.

Awards are normally made quarterly, although the Board may choose to consider awards at other times. Membership in the Foundation is not required to receive an award.

PSF members should submit confidential nominations to the Board by sending email to psf@python.org.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Third-Quarter Community Service Awards

Regular readers will know that the Foundation periodically honors those who have made significant contributions to its mission. Often these people aren't even members of the Foundation, but this doesn't exclude them. At its recent meeting the PSF Board voted Community Awards to two people, one of whom isn't currently a member.

Noufal Ibrahim Noufal was nominated for heading up the organizing team for the recent (and very successful) first PyCon India conference held on September 26 and 27 in Bangalore, attracting 450 delegates. Although Noufal was "first among equals" this award also recognizes the work of everyone who helped to make the inaugural conference so successful.

Barry Warsaw Many people are unaware of the huge volume of mail that is processed by software written in Python every hour of every day. This is because they don't know about the Mailman project, which was Barry's brainchild. Barry, a founder member of the Foundation, also acted as release manager for several recent Python releases.

The Foundation is grateful to Noufal and Barry for their efforts, each of which helps to promote Python's popularity and increase the Python community as a whole.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Second-Quarter Community Service Awards

The Foundation tries to recognize those whose assistance has been significant in its growth and development as well as its day-to-day operations. This quarter's Community Service Award winners are two particularly noteworthy examples.

Stephan Deibel Stephan was last year's outgoing chairman after four years in harness. This year Stephan has stepped down as a director, after helping to ensure that the Foundation's bylaws were reorganized. Stephan developed pythonology.com to promote Python, and his work as founder of Wingware and a developer of the Wing IDE has also had a significant impact.

Sean Reifschneider Sean has master-minded the PyCOn networking every time it's worked, and without the support of this always helpful and reliably competent tummy.com director our conferences simply would not have been the same.

Our thanks and congratulations go to both these recipients.

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Georg Brandl and Brett Cannon to Receive PSF Community Awards

At the July Board meeting of the PSF Board of Directors, PSF Community Awards were awarded to Georg Brandl and Brett Cannon.

Georg has been an enthusiastic contributor to the core for several years, and a while ago stunned the Python development world by building the Sphinx documentation system as an alternative to the LaTeX-based system we had been using previously, and converting the Python documentation to use it.

Brett has also been an active core developer for many years, but was nominated for his infrastructure work in migrating the Python bug-tracking system off of SourceForge to our own Roundup instance, and for his efforts keeping the Python developer introduction updated.

Georg and Brett richly deserve recognition for their contributions. Congratulations to Brett and Georg, and thanks for all your hard work!

For more information, please see the PSF Community Awards page on python.org.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Martin von Löwis Receives 2008 Frank Willison Award

Yesterday at OSCON I had the pleasure of announcing the 2008 Frank Willison award. This was instituted by O'Reilly in memory of their editor in chief, whose "Frankly Speaking" column was a regular joy on the web: guaranteed to entertain and inform. Frank was a great supporter of Python, and a believer in the value of communities.

Martin von Löwis continues to be a tireless worker on behalf of the Python community. He has been a long-term contributor to the Python core, and regularly answers questions on both the python-dev list and the comp.lang.python newsgroup. A PSF director since 2002 he was also the prime mover in transitioning the Python development infrastructure from SourceForge, and has created several Roundup issue trackers for various areas. He chaired the PSF grants committee, which among other achievements kept Jython alive when its future looked uncertain. I could go on, but you get the idea: when something needs doing, he rarely hesitates to step up to the plate.

Martin has, until today, been one of our unsung heroes. I hope all readers will join me in congratulating him on this well-deserved award.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Python Wins "Favorite Scripting Language" Award

May 1, 2008 Linux Journal announced their 2008 Readers' Choice Awards today, and we are happy to say that Python won the Favorite Scripting Language category with 28.9% of the vote. PHP, Bash and Perl (in that order) won honorable mentions. Thanks to everyone who took the time to register their votes. Python's popularity does seem to be climbing this year, as attendance at the recent Chicago PyCon confirmed with a 77% increase in attendance. Let's hope that leads to career opportunities for Python users!

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

PSF Community Awards

A little-publicized feature of this year's PyCon was the first ever PSF Community Awards. One of the issues with being a Foundation of part-timers is that sometimes we do something important without finding a way to give it the right prominence. If I were able to borrow Guido's time machine and go round PyCon again these awards would have been made in front of the first keynote speech.

Even the recipients of the awards were blissfully unaware of their elevated status until our outgoing Chairman, Stephan Deibel, informed them by email. So let me list these unsung heroes (in alphabetical order). If you have benefited by their work it would be nice if you could find time to add a (short) comment to this post to let them know how much their hard work is appreciated.

Matthew Dixon Cowles Matthew has been a tireless (and unfailingly polite) responder to the many users of python-help list, used by those seeking assistance not readily available through other channels. This assistance covers not only elementary questions but also quite advanced ones. Matthew has been a member of the Python community for many years, patiently answering questions and enlightening those who seek to get more out of the Python language.

Brad Knowles Brad has managed the python.org e-mail since I can remember, and it's down to him that our lists and newsgroups are so blissfully free of spam. It's hard to appreciate the sheer volume of mail that Brad handles, and he is fiercely defensive of our domain's status on the Internet. Keeping the e-mail flowing is essential not just to the PSF but also to all the users of mailing lists and newsgroups. Brad does all this not because he is a big Python user, but because it needs to be done. This is the community service ethic at its best.

Peter Kropf and Martin Thomas Peter and Martin are probably best known to those people who want to employ Python programmers, as they have jointly been almost the sole workforce behind the Python Job Board for the last several years. The fact that the Job Board exists, and is available free of charge to anyone looking to hire people with Python skills, is possibly more central to Python's rise in popularity than we appreciate. PyCon chairman David Goodger paid tribute to the Job Board as helping him out of unemployment in his opening remarks this year, and I know there are dozens if not hundreds of others who should be similarly grateful to Peter and Martin.

We should also not overlook those who answer the elementary questions we get on the python-tutor mailing list. The list is often overlooked by the more advanced Python users, but this is where anyone can come and get their first questions about Python answered (and often learn programming along the way). The friendly courtesy they meet there sets the tone for future Python community interactions, which may be one reason why comp.lang.python has such a reputation for courtesy. Apologies to the python-tutor list members for an earlier mistaken attribution of Matthew's affiliation.

The PSF Board has been discussing (and, when I dropped the ball, failing to discuss) an awards scheme for some time now, and these first four awards represent the beginnings of a way to regularly offer some recognition to people who tirelessly support Python and its community year in year out. They will not just be made at PyCon but at intervals throughout the year, and future nominations will come from the membership at large.

The award comes in the form of a free registration to a future PyCon, $500 towards conference expenses, and a handsome (but yet-to-be designed) certificate. Thanks for all your hard work on behalf of the whole Python community, guys! One of the benefits of the awards is that now I know I'll be able to see you all at PyCon next year!

Steve Holden