Thursday, April 28, 2011

Online Degree Reviews Joins the PSF as Sponsor Member

The Python Software Foundation is happy to welcome Online Degree Reviews as a sponsor member. The Online Degree Reviews website allows students to review and discuss experiences about online college degrees. The site is written in Python using the Django web framework.

Steve Rawlinson gave their reasons for signing up to sponsor the Foundation:

We'd like to give back to the Python community that made Online Degree Reviews possible by using some of the advertising revenues the site generates. We hope that our sponsorship of the Python Software Foundation will allow developers to focus on what they do best, including continued improvements to the language, and support the Python language eco-system.

Becoming a Sponsor

Sponsor members pay annual dues to support the Foundation's activities. Prospective sponsor members apply for membership to the PSF board. The board verifies that they meet the criteria set out for sponsor members and then votes on whether to recommend them for sponsor membership in the next election. For more information about membership in the Python Software Foundation, refer to the Membership FAQ.

Monday, April 25, 2011

Zimbio Joins the PSF as a Sponsor Member

The Python Software Foundation is pleased to welcome Zimbio as a new sponsor member. Zimbio is the online magazine publisher behind pop culture websites http://zimbio.com (covering entertainment news) and http://stylebistro.com (covering fashion). Their publishing platform and content analysis tools are built in Python.

Danny Khatib gave this explanation for sponsoring the PSF:

We love Python. We have benefited greatly from its open source nature and we have vested professional and personal interests in helping it thrive. For technical recruiting purposes, we want to align ourselves more closely with the open source technologies we embrace (primarily Python and Django). From an awareness perspective, we want to be known as the most technologically sophisticated media company on the planet, so engineers will be excited to work for us. From a talent perspective, we hope that getting more involved with the Python Software Foundation and discussion will enable us to more easily identify great talent.

Becoming a Sponsor

Sponsor members pay annual dues to support the Foundation's activities. Prospective sponsor members apply for membership to the PSF board. The board verifies that they meet the criteria set out for sponsor members and then votes on whether to recommend them for sponsor membership in the next election. For more information about membership in the Python Software Foundation, refer to the Membership FAQ.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

The PSF Elects New Members

The Python Software Foundation is pleased to announce the roster of new nominated members chosen during the most recent round of elections. Nominated members are individuals or entities who have demonstrated a commitment to the Python language and community. They are nominated and elected by existing members of the Foundation. For more information about membership in the Python Software Foundation, refer to the FAQ.

Ned Batchelder

Ned Batchelder organizes the Boston Python Meetup group and is a frequent PyCon speaker. He maintains coverage.py, a widely-used module for analyzing test coverage of source code. Most recently, he has been working with others in the Boston meetup group to create workshops with the goal of increasing the diversity of our community.

Vern Ceder

Vern Ceder is the author of the Quick Python Book, second edition. He has presented a number of times about using Python for education. Vern has also been involved in PyCon US as the originator and organizer of the poster session, a new feature of the conference added in 2010.

Rick Copeland

Rick Copeland is a programmer and the author of Essential SQLAlchemy. He has contributed to the TurboGears project and several templating languages. Rick also speaks regularly at the the Atlanta Python users' group.

Brian Curtin

Brian Curtin manages the PSF Sprints project and Python Insider, the blog for python-dev. He also participates in the program and organizing committees for PyCon US. As a core committer, Brian has helped secure and manage MSDN licenses for the core development team.

Maciej Fijalkowski

Maciej Fijalkowski is an active member of the PyPy project and one of its lead developers. He has continued to help with issues that span between PyPy and CPython. Maciej also regularly attends PyCon, speaks there, and participated in both summits and sprints.

Yannick Gingras

Yannick Gingras is the organizer for the Montreal Python user group. He introduced a Python track into the Confoo PHP conference. Yannick also contributes to the Packaging project and Django documentation translation.

Daniel Greenfeld

Danny has contributed extensively in the Django and Pinax ecosystems, and is the author of the Django Packages web system that allows people to compare and select the packages they need to build their applications. He has also been active on the PyCon Program Committee over the past two years.

Jonathan Hartley

Jonathan Hartley is a Python developer from the UK. In the last few years he has been a regular speaker at PyCon US, EuroPython, and PyCon UK. Jonathan is also involved in the London Python scene, PyWeek, and many other Python-related activities.

Philip Jenvey

Philip Jenvey is a founder of the Pylons project. He is also a core developer of Jython, CPython, and SQLAlchemy. His contributions range from implementation, recruiting developers, bug triage, advocacy, and managing the project release cycles.

Brian K. Jones

Brian K. Jones is a programmer, author, and trainer. He has delivered Python tutorials at conferences including PICC and PyCon. Brian is the co-editor, along with David Beazley, of the upcoming Python Cookbook, 3rd Edition from O'Reilly. He is the former Editor in Chief of Python Magazine, which he also created in collaboration with the publisher.

Jonathan LaCour

Jonathan LaCour has contributed to the TurboGears and Elixir projects. He also speaks regularly at PyCon. His company, ShootQ, is a Python success story.

Mike Orr

Mike Orr is a contributor on the Cheetah, Quixote, and Pylons projects. He helped found SeaPIG (the Seattle Python Interest Group) and co-leads it. Mike has also written several articles about PyCon and Python in Linux Gazette.

Fabio Pliger

Fabio Pliger is one of the founders of PyCon Italia, and is one of the head organisers for EuroPython this year, since the PyCon Italia team is running the conference. He has also contributed to other conferences and has encouraged the collaboration between Python communities in several European countries.

Ronald Oussoren

Ronald Oussoren is a core contributor to CPython. He has made significant contributions to the Mac OS port of CPython, especially through PyObjC.

Lennart Regebro

Lennart Regebro is a long time Python developer and author of the recently released Porting to Python 3. He's also a contributor to distribute and has taken a leading role in porting Zope-related packages to Python 3.

Gregory Smith

Gregory Smith is a long-time contributor to CPython. He oversaw the integration of the BerkeleyDB module into the standard library and currently contributes to the hashlib, subprocess, and unittest modules. Gregory also works on issues related to concurrency and 64-bit architectures.

Richard Taylor

Richard Taylor helps organize PyCon UK and EuroPython. He has also contributed to several projects, including kamaelia and GRAMPS. Richard was the technical reviewer for Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional

Monday, April 18, 2011

Board of Directors for 2011-2012

The members of the Python Software Foundation have re-elected all 13 members of the current Board of Directors to another term.

  • Raymond Hettinger
  • Steve Holden
  • Marc-André Lemburg
  • David Mertz
  • Douglas Napoleone
  • Jesse Noller
  • Tim Peters
  • Allison Randal
  • Jeff Rush
  • Greg Stein
  • James Tauber
  • Martin von Löwis
  • Gloria Willadsen

About the Board

PSF Directors are elected annually and are responsible for managing the business of the foundation, as outlined in the bylaws. They fulfill two responsibilities:

  1. Completing or overseeing administrative tasks related to the legal standing of the Foundation. These include responding to trademark or licensing queries and monitoring the Foundation's financial health.
  2. Completing "special projects" such as fund raising, administering grants, and supporting day-to-day operations of the Python community.

A director's specific duties depend on the office and any sub-committee memberships held. The board meets monthly via IRC. Minutes from the meetings are available online. Most Directors are volunteers, although some Officer positions (Treasurer and Secretary) do receive a nominal salary.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Kiwi PyCon Receives US$2000

The 2011 Kiwi Python Conference was awarded a US$2,000 grant from the Python Software Foundation during the latter's March board meeting. Kiwi PyCon is the premier Python Conference of New Zealand and will by held in Wellington from August 27th through the 28th. It is organized by the New Zealand Python Users Group (NZPUG). You can register now to make sure your spot is reserved. The organizers are currently looking for proposals for talks on all aspects of Python, so you have an opportunity to get involved and submit a talk. Now is a good time for you to take that trip to New Zealand that you have always wanted!

Thursday, April 07, 2011

PSF Grants EuroPython US$2000

During its March board meeting the Python Software Foundation approved a US$2,000 grant for the 2011 EuroPython Conference. EuroPython is the official European conference about the Python programming language. It will be held in Florence, Italy June 20-26. You can go to their website to register for the conference. EuroPython is an excellent excuse to visit Italy, so sign up today!

Monday, April 04, 2011

PSF Grant Funds Porting Work for the email Package

R. David Murray recently completed work funded by the PSF to update Python's email package to work with Python 3.2. The result of the project is a fully functioning version of the standard library package for parsing and constructing email messages.

Project History

The version of the email package that was shipped with Python 3.0 and 3.1 had some bugs, not the least of which was the inability to handle binary inputs. The parser was limited to files and messages in ASCII. Due to this, under Python 3 the email module could only create messages and never receive anything. This deficiency broke many applications that depend on email. For example, the cgi package uses the email package to process binary uploads.

After discussions held in the email-sig discussion group, a complete rewrite of the API was suggested as the only option and R. David Murray submitted a proposal to the PSF to fund the development of Email 6. The proposal was initially accepted, and some seed money (including matching funds) were provided. Since then, additional funding has been provided by QNX.

At first, David spent some time working on the Policy framework, and with some help from Antoine Pitrou, who fixed some issues in the nntp module, David devised a way to integrated byte handling in the email package without a complete rewrite of the original code by using extensions to the API that allow it to accept and generate bytes. The implementation used the "surrogateescape" mechanism, developed by Martin von Löwis, allowing minimum code modifications.

David also provided some modifications to smtplib, enabling it to transmit messages with non-ASCII characters. He also worked with Victor Stinner to give the cgi module the ability to handle binary data. They then took on the task of updating the mailbox module, and using the new features coded initially by David, made mailbox fully functional for Python 3.2.

David mentions that there are still some bugs, specially in the transition to the string/byte separation, but, also according to him, these bugs were greatly reduced in version 3.2.

All this work gave Python 3.2 a fully functional email handling package. The nntplib, smtplib, email, cgi and mailbox modules were also made functional, something that benefits the whole Python community. The grant provided by PSF paved the way to reach full functionality.

Friday, April 01, 2011

EuroPython 2011 Call for Presentations

The EuroPython 2011 organizers are accepting proposals for talks. They are looking for presentations on every aspect of Python, including programming from novice to advanced levels, applications and frameworks, and how you have been involved in introducing Python into your organisation.

The deadline for submissions is April 6th.

EuroPython

EuroPython is the official European conference about the Python programming language. The conference is being held June 20–26 in Florence, Italy, at the Mediterraneo Conference Centre, situated near the heart of Florence’s old city centre.

Presenting at EuroPython

The organizers will accept a broad range of presentations, from reports on academic and commercial projects to tutorials and case studies. As long as the presentation is interesting and potentially useful to the Python community, it will be considered for the program.

First-time speakers are especially welcome.

For more details about how to submit a proposal, refer to the official call for presentations on the EuroPython website.