I Want to Become a Core Python Developer

October 30, 2017 | programming | python |

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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This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

A eulogy for Vim from Drew DeVault's blog
Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
Offline 23 hours a day from Derek Sivers blog
Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
On Alliances from Smashing Frames
Acting ethically in an imperfect world from Smashing Frames
Diffusion of Responsibility from Smashing Frames

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast

I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines. It's available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Here …

via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries April 2, 2026

Flood Fill vs the Magic Circle

Musings from Robin Sloan: Most olive oil production at medium-or-greater scale depends on machines of this kind [over-the-row olive harvester]; they trundle over trees planted in long rows, almost like continuous hedges, and collect the fruit with vibratin…

via Information Overload April 2, 2026

The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized Sensitivity

Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»…

via Jim Nielsen’s Blog April 2, 2026

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