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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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

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On concrete examples

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Should we be afraid of AI? Maybe a little

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