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.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Edge Detection with Inkscape
- Lev Lazinskiy
- Spring Security, Webjars, and MIME type error
- Using cgit
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Joining Cursor from Fatih Arslan
- Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making from Ludicity
- No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass from Fernando Borretti
- Is it ethical to use AI? from charity.wtf
- The logical destination of LLMs from Andy Bell
- Revised rules of engineering leadership. from Irrational Exuberance
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things
Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its prede...
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries August 16, 2026“I think there’s a lot of value in these.”
Speaking of user interface guidelines, developer Matt Sephton and others compiled many of Apple’s human interface guidelines, starting from 1980, all the way to 2014, including some goodies like early drafts, NeXT, Newton, and so on. Elsewhere, designer Ge...
via Unsung August 16, 2026Birding photos from Dutch Gap on Aug 15, 2026
Birding photos from Dutch Gap on Aug 15, 2026 My best bird photo from this morning is a dragonfly (Eastern Pondhawk, I think). Least Sandpiper Green Heron Red-headed Woodpecker. It's a juvenile, so its head is not actually red yet.
via O'DonnellWeb August 16, 2026Generated by openring