I Want to Become a Core Python Developer
I’ve been tinkering with python for almost five years now. I am absolutely in love with the language. My new goal is to make enough contributions to the project to join the core team.
This post is my attempt to keep a list of all that I’ve done in this endeavor. I will keep this up to date on a monthly basis.
Short Term Goals
- Ship some actual code. Focus on improving test coverage.
- Attend the next available local meetup.
- Get this PR merged.
- Work on some other low hanging fruit from bedevere.
November 2017
Code
- Reported an issue with Vagrant and Ansible on the pythondotorg repo, and assisted with testing the resolution. (note, for any future newbies, reporting issues, writing docs, testing PRs, these are all super valuable things that you can do to get more familiar with a projects code base).
- Substantial refactoring of the dev guide merged.
Community
- Reached out to the core workflow team to see if we could introduce CircleCI into the Python organization. This addresses the PoC showed in this PR.
October 2017
Code
- First "official" contribution is adding a
#
to a URL in a doc. Hey, you gotta start somewhere.
Community
- Became a PSF Member.
- Hang out in various IRC channels. Notably #python on freenode and help out where I can.
- Join the PSF Volunteers mailing list and volunteer for opportunities as they come in.
- Sign up for all the dev related mailing lists.
- Joined the BAyPIGgies local python meetup group.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- The Software Essays that Shaped Me from Refactoring English
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
- Skip the Next iPhone from Articles on Jose M.
- Have smart glasses finally hit an inflection point? from The Torment Nexus
- The McPhee method from the jsomers.net blog
- Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
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