Python Software Foundation News

Python Software Foundation Fellow Members for Q3 2017

2017-10-02T10:00:00.000-04:00

We are happy to announce our 2017 3rd Quarter Python Software Foundation Fellow Members: 

Aisha Bello

Brian Costlow

Carol Willing

Carrie Anne Philbin

Cory Benfield

Damien George

Daniel Pope

Daniele Procida

Dusty Phillips

Jackie Kazil

Laura Cassell

Lorena Mesa

Łukasz Langa

Peter Inglesby

Ruben Orduz  

Congratulations! Thank you for all of the contributions you continue to make. We have added you to our Fellow roster online.

The PSF Fellow Work Group was established in July of 2017. This is the first set of Fellows the Work Group has reviewed and voted on. Since we are a new group, we spent a few months establishing policies and criteria.

The work group voted to review nominees 4 times a year:

Q1: January to the end of March (01/01 - 31/03) Cut-off for nominations will be February 20. New fellows will be announced before March 31.
Q2: April to the end of June (01/04 - 30/06) Cut-off for quarter two will be May 20. New fellows will be announced before June 30.
Q3: July to the end of September (01/07 - 30/09) Cut-off for quarter three will be August 20. New fellows will be announced before end of September. 
Q4: October to the end of December (01/10 - 31/12) Cut-off for quarter four will be November 20. New fellows will be announced before December 31.

In addition to the schedule, we also voted on the following criteria:

 For those who have served the Python community by creating and/or maintaining various engineering/design contributions, the following statement should be true:

 Nominated Person has served the Python community by making available code, tests, documentation, or design, either in a Python implementation or in a Python ecosystem project, that 1) shows technical excellence, 2) is an example of software engineering principles and best practices, and 3) has achieved widespread usage or acclaim.

For those who have served the Python community by coordinating, organizing, teaching, writing, and evangelizing, the following statement should be true:

 Nominated Person has served the Python community through extraordinary efforts in organizing Python events, publicly promoting Python, and teaching and coordinating others. Nominated Person's efforts have shown leadership and resulted in long-lasting and substantial gains in the number and quality of Python users, and have been widely recognized as being above and beyond normal volunteering.

If someone is not accepted to be a fellow in the quarter they were nominated for, they will remain an active nominee for 1 year for future consideration. 
It is suggested/recommended that the nominee have wide Python community involvement. Examples would be (not a complete list - just examples):

Someone who has received a Community Service Award or Distinguished Service Award
A developer that writes (more than one) documentation/books/tutorials for wider audience .
Someone that helps translate (more than one) documentation/books/tutorials for better inclusivity.
 An instructor that teaches Python related tutorials in various regions .
Someone that helps organize local meet ups and also helps organize a regional conference.

 Nominees should be aware of the Python community’s Code of Conduct and should have a record of fostering the community. 
Sitting members of the PSF Board of Directors can be nominated if they meet the above criteria.

If you would like to nominate someone to be a PSF Fellow, please send a description of their Python accomplishments to psf-fellow at python.org. If you send in your nomination before November 20, it will be considered in Q4. More info is available here. 

We are still looking for a few more voting members to join the Work Group. If you are a PSF Fellow and would like to join, please write to psf-fellow at python.org.

A New Python Security Mailing List

2017-09-29T10:00:00.000-04:00

The Python community takes security very seriously. In an effort to enhance security and promote transparency about security matters, the Python Security Response Team (PSRT) has created a security-announce mailing list. This mailing list will allow the PSRT to communicate about security-related matters to anyone in the Python community who signs up. Join this list to stay on top of the most recent security fixes to the Python language. Click here to learn more about the mailing list and to sign up!

Join the Python Developers Survey 2017: Share and learn about the community

2017-09-26T11:01:00.000-04:00

2017 is drawing to a close and we are super-excited to start the official Python Developers Survey 2017!

We’ve created this survey specially for Python developers who use it as their primary or supplementary language. We expect the survey findings to help us map an accurate landscape of the Python developer community and to provide insight into the current major trends in the Python community.

Please take a few minutes to complete the Python Developers Survey 2017!

Your valuable opinion and feedback will help us better understand how different Python developers use Python and related frameworks, tools and technologies. We also hope you'll have fun going through the questions.

The survey is organized in partnership between the Python Software Foundation and JetBrains. After the survey is over, we will publish the aggregated results and randomly choose 100 winners (from those who complete the survey in its entirety), who will each receive an amazing Python Surprise Gift Pack.

The PyLady Behind PyLadies: Lynn Root, Community Service Award 2nd Quarter 2017 Recipient

2017-09-25T09:00:00.000-04:00

PyLadies is an international mentorship community for women that use Python. Started with a grant in 2011, PyLadies has continued to bring women into the Python community through a variety of methods, including hosting events in local PyLadies chapters as well as offering a grant opportunity to attend PyCon. One woman in particular has contributed to PyLadies' success, for which the PSF recognized her as a Community Service Award recipient for the 2nd Quarter of 2017:

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation Q2 2017 Community Service Award to Lynn Root for her work as the founder of the San Francisco Chapter of PyLadies, a member of the Django Software Foundation, and as a tireless volunteer at PyCon.

PyLadies in the early days, the Start of the San Francisco Chapter

If you can name one person associated with PyLadies, it is Lynn Root. Lynn’s relentless support, organizing, and evangelizing on behalf of PyLadies is known by many. “Lynn’s enthusiasm and passion for bringing more women into tech are well complemented by her organizational skills, which were especially needed at pivotal moment in early PyLadies history. Lynn helped grow PyLadies into, what is now, a global organization that’s had a huge impact on the Python community,” PyLady Esther Nam, one of the founders of the PyLadies Los Angeles chapter, explains.

In late 2011, Lynn began learning to program, as some of graduate programs she was considering required her to have some programming expertise. “I reached out to San Francisco’s Women Who Code to organize a Python study group,” Lynn recalls, trying to find like-minded women to join. She had used Python in a weekend hackathon and found it to be a beginner friendly language. The following year, in 2012, PyCon was held in Santa Clara. “Lynn reached out and organized a carpool of Bay Area Pythonistas to attend the conference”, Esther remembers. PyLadies from the first chapter in Los Angeles attended, where Lynn met with them to learn more about PyLadies. The next month, she founded the San Francisco chapter. Lynn continued to act as a principal organizer for PyLadies San Francisco for the next four years.

Growing PyLadies in the Global Community

Overlapping with her time as PyLadies San Francisco lead organizer, Lynn championed other significant projects including the creation of `pip install pyladies`, the PyLadies open source kit for new organizers. The development of open source tools for PyLadies has been instrumental in getting the word out about PyLadies. Lynn was able to use these tools to help start international PyLadies communities in Stockholm, Zagreb, and Brno.

Lynn also took an active role in bringing PyLadies content to PyCon. During Lynn’s first term on the Python Software Foundation Board of Directors in 2013 to 2014, Lynn helped plan and run the first PyLadies Charity Auction at PyCon. Months of work go into organizing the charity auction; it requires donations to be procured beforehand, besides auctioneering on-site. The inaugural PyLadies Charity Auction raised $10,000.00 USD for PyLadies. Commenting in a 2013 press release about the auction, Atlanta PyLadies founder Laura Cassell explains, “we're all so resourceful already that I suspect this money is going to go a long way towards helping women who want to get into the industry. I'm still a little misty-eyed at the whole thing, to be honest."

Besides her PyLadies work, Lynn has been a speaker at PyCon four times, PyCon Lightning Talk Chair since 2014, frequent session runner, and recurring PyCon volunteer.

PyLadies Benevolent Dictator for Life?

I asked Lynn if she has ever been called the PyLadies Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL). Lynn shook her head, she does not see herself in that fashion. But it is hard to refute the strong footprint she has left on the PyLadies community. Lynn has written several Python open source tutorials, like the web scraping with scrapy and postgres, that are often used in PyLadies workshops and are highly visited (over 65,000 times to date this year!), and has spoken at PyCons around the world: EuroPython, PyCon Finland, and PyCon Brasil. Lynn was the original PyLady I consulted with when starting the PyLadies Chicago chapter in 2014.

From founding her local PyLadies chapter, to volunteering at PyCon, to catalyzing other initiatives like the Django Software Foundation, Lynn has been an unwavering advocate for women in the Python community and for the broader Python community itself. The thing that Lynn says has been most satisfying for her as a Python community organizer and advocate has been the rise of women in Python. “In 2012 only 8% of speakers at PyCon were women now in 2017 we have approximately 33%”.

With the rise of PyLadies at PyCon and throughout the world, it’ll be exciting to see what comes next for the PyLadies community and for those that have helped make PyLadies such a tremendous success.

Improving Python and Expanding Access: How the PSF Uses Your Donation

2017-09-18T16:02:00.000-04:00

The PSF is excited to announce its first ever membership drive beginning on September 18th! Our goal for this inaugural drive is to raise $4,000.00 USD in donations and sign up 3,000 new members in 30 days.

If you’ve never donated to the PSF, you've let your membership lapse, or you've thought about becoming a Supporting Member - here is your chance to make a difference.

Join the PSF as a Supporting Member or Donate to the PSF

You can donate as an individual or join the PSF as a Supporting Member. Supporting members pay $99.00 USD per year to help sustain the Foundation and support the Python community. Supporting members are also eligible to vote for candidates for the PSF Board of Directors, changes in the PSF bylaws, and other matters related to the infrastructure of the foundation.

To become a supporting member or to make a donation, click on the widget here and follow the instructions at the bottom of the page.

We know many of you already make a great effort to support us; you volunteer your time to help us keep our website going, you join working groups to help with marketing, sponsorship, grant requests, trademarks, Python education, and packaging. Even more, you help the PSF put on PyCon US, a conference we couldn’t do without the help of our volunteers. The collective efforts and contributions of our volunteers help drive our work. We will forever be grateful to the people who step forward and ask, “What can I do to help advance open source technology related to Python?”

We understand that not everyone has the time to volunteer, but perhaps you’re in a position to help financially.

We’re asking those who are able, to donate money to support sprints, meet ups, and community events. Donations support Python documentation, fiscal sponsorships, software development, and community projects. They help fund the critical tools programmers use every day.

If you're not in a position to contribute financially, that's ok. Basic membership is free and we welcome anyone who would like to join at this level. Register here to create your member account, log back in, then complete the form to become a basic member.

What does the PSF do?

We fund great projects. So far this year we have approved over $200,000.00 USD in grants to over 140 events worldwide. We’re on track to surpass last year’s total of $265,000.00 USD in grants to 137 events in 45 different countries. 
We organize and host PyCon US. This year’s event brought together 3,389 attendees from 41 countries, a new record for PyCon! Our sponsors’ support enabled us to award $89,000.00 USD in financial aid to 194 attendees. 
We celebrate awesome Python contributors. Community Service Awards are given out quarterly, honoring individuals who support our mission.  
We implemented a trial Python Ambassador program that we hope to expand in the next year. This program provides funding for a dedicated Pythonista to travel locally to perform Python outreach.  
We provide fiscal sponsorship support for Python projects, where the PSF collects targeted donations and reimburses expenses on that projects' behalf. 
We support Python programmers worldwide by funding sprints and workshops that enable people to work on Python-related projects that advance the mission of the PSF.

Here is what one of our sponsors has to say about why they contribute to the PSF:

“Work on stuff that matters is one of O’Reilly’s core principles, and we know how very much open source matters. The open source community spurs innovation, shares knowledge, encourages growth, and creates industries. The Python Software Foundation is a prime example of the power of open source, showing how focused, thoughtful, and consistent efforts can create a community whose impact extends far beyond meetups and lines of code. O’Reilly is proud to continue to sponsor this great foundation.”
-- Rachel Roumeliotis, Vice President at O’Reilly Media and Chair of OSCON

Lastly, if you’d like to share the news about the PSF’s Membership drive, please share a tweet via the tweet button here:

Or share a tweet with the following text:

Donation & Membership Drive @ThePSF. Help us raise $4K and register 3K new members in 30 days! http://bit.ly/2h3dxpb #idonatedtothepsf

We at the PSF want to thank you for all that you do. Your support is what makes the PSF possible.

Au revoir PyCon Pune

2017-09-14T20:21:00.001-04:00

By Anwesha Das

February 2017 marked the beginning of a new journey for a new regional Python Conference - PyCon Pune.

PyCon is the meeting place for community. It gives Pythonistas an opportunity to come out of the virtual world and meet the real people behind the nicknames and the handles. It gives them an opportunity to learn new things and share their knowledge with others.

Considering the vast geographical territory of India, a single PyCon event wasn’t sufficient. PyCon Pune offered the Python community another chance to interact.

It was a four-day event; the main conference on the first two days and development sprints the second two. It was a single-track event, so all 550 attendees could attend all the sessions.

The inside story:

Pune, also known as the Oxford of the East, is amongst the fastest growing cities in the Asia Pacific region. Pune witnessed this PyCon at a hotel called Amonora, the Fern. The venue was beautiful, and we were grateful to have it: just a few weeks before the conference began, we were afraid we would have no venue at all!

The event had been located at one of oldest engineering colleges in Pune, but the venue canceled two weeks prior to the conference. Not quite the kind of news any organizers would like to hear, last minute (I can vouch for that, I was one of them).

Python Software Foundation then extended its hand to help. Team PyCon Pune as well as the Python community in India cannot thank the PSF enough for this.

PyLadies in PyCon Pune:

The PSF has always been a huge supporter of PyLadies. This time, they offered to share their booth with us. PyLadies had a huge presence at the event. From volunteering, to management, PyLadies were there everywhere. Yes, “Python is for girls.” And if we PyLadies need support in the face of a crisis, the PSF is there to hold us.

United we stand:

The first ever thing that we decided for the conference was the quote to be used on the conference t-shirt.

“Came for the language, stayed for the community”, by Brett Cannon

This set the tone of the conference. The conference is a completely volunteer-driven event: the website, finance, AV and the overall management were run by volunteers, celebrating the community in the truest sense. Help poured in from pythonistas worldwide. The logo was designed by Ryan Larch from Australia. Python communities from all over India along with Python Pune and PyLadies worked tirelessly together to make the event a success. These people keep the soul of Python (the community and language) alive.

Day 1 and Day 2 of the main conference:

With a welcome note by Kushal Das, the chair commenced the conference. The first keynote was by Honza Král. He talked about his journey in the open source world. It was interesting to know about his hurdles and how he overcame them. It is also always inspiring to see at masters were students once too. Next, Anand Chitipothu taught us to write beautiful code.The post-lunch session began with the keynote by the “official Perl guy” of the Python community, John “Warthog” Hawley, who described the path from software to hardware hacking.

The day ended with an enchanting experience - a keynote by Pravin Patil, a teacher who uses Python to teach Physics. Python plus Physics plus a Laser equaled magic in his presentation.

Katie Cunningham began Day 2, followed by the Economics Professor Stephen Turnbull. He has helped to develop Ghostscript, XEmacs, Python, and GNU Mailman. He offered a word of encouragement to us saying, “You can help develop Python - and you should!” After lunch, Nick Coghlan delivered his keynote. He discussed “opportunities and challenges in open collaboration.” The last keynote talk was by Terri Oda, about security in the open source world.

This led to the end of the main conference. The mentors for the dev sprints spoke on what they were going to work on. An open feedback session marked the close of the main conference.

Day 3 and Day 4 of the Developers Sprint

For sprints, the conference moved to the Red Hat office in Pune. A dozen projects added features and fixed bugs during the final two days of the conference. The sprints had proven to be the most popular portion of the conference: Tickets had sold out within a week.

The Red Hat office looked like a hackerspace over the weekend. People were coding, learning, having fun and celebrating Python. It was the first ever dev sprint experience for more than 95% of the attendees. It took most of the people to some time to understand what is going on and how they could participate.

Slowly folks started flocking around different mentors. There were good number of people gathering around Nick—many Pythonistas have a dream to become CPython core developers. More than 10 patches were submitted to the language. Web.py, ElasticSearch, Django, es-django-example, OpenCabs, Pagure and micropython held sprints as well. The actual number of patches submitted can be found here.

I took shelter in the micropython and hardware room, where we were worked on fun bunny boards with esp8266 devices. John was there guiding us, changing our lives (my life for certain) with blinking LEDs. The best surprise came at the end. He gave each of us a bunny board. What a lovely souvenir to take home!

The conference is intended to give people the feeling of community. The event is over but the spirit is hasn’t diminished. Please join us next year for PyCon Pune 2018, February 8 - 11.

PythonDay Mexico: Recap of the Inaugural PythonDay in Mexico

2017-09-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

It has been three years since I first learned about PyCon. I watched some workshops and talks and I was amazed by how inviting, open and inclusive the community was. In fact, that was one of the key aspects that inspired me to learn Python, use it, help build the Python community here in Mexico.

Fast forward to the beginning of this year: I was contacted by the organizer of LinuxChix in Mexico, who is also member of PyLadies, with the idea of organizing a PythonDay in Mexico. This first PythonDay, she suggested, had the purpose of bringing a PyCon to Mexico. We eventually found another woman who shared the same ideal and we set about working to bring the Mexican Python community to an event that, hopefully, inspired them to be better Pythonistas the same way the first PyCon i witnessed did to me.

We first wondered how big of a community we had in Mexico. Despite being involved with Python for three years I barely knew the people or meet ups, apart from PyLadies, in Mexico devoted to the language. We figured that with Mexico being a country of 130 million there was large chance there would be a sizable population interested in Python. Along the way we discovered that the Python community in Mexico is not only vast, but also scattered across the nation. These reasons only encouraged us more to organize a PythonDay, it would be a great starting point to bring together the community.

Who came to PythonDay Mexico

We selected June 10, 2017 as the day for the first PythonDay Mexico. People from all over the country came to meet their fellow Pythonistas and listen to the amazing talks we selected for this year.

Initially we expected about 160 people, but we could not have been farther off! Over 400 people registered for the event and in its peak, approximately 300 Pythonistas were in attendance. We were glad to learn that 30% of the attendees in the event were women, which is not a high number, but in comparison to the roughly 15% of women in technology it gives hope to learn that many women are interested in programming.

Attendees traveled up to 1270 miles to attend PythonDay Mexico. In terms of geography there were attendees from Sinaloa, Jalisco, Hidalgo, Nuevo Leon, Puebla, Mexico City and Yucatan and every one of them was excited to hear the talks and workshops as well as to meet other Python lovers.

During the event we did not have any incident or complaint; everybody followed and honored the Code of Conduct lending to a greatly collaborative. Honestly we could not have asked for a better audience. But then again, Python communities all over the world are like this, awesome.

A Global Selection of Python Speakers

PythonDay Mexico had an amazingly diverse set of speakers. We had people from Paraguay, India, USA, Italy, Germany and Mexico. Even if our speakers could not be physically present, they made efforts to actually engage and interact with the audience in their remote presentations. Many of our remote speakers are a part of the Python Software Foundation Board of Directors like Naomi Ceder, Trey Hunner. Board member Lorena Mesa gave her talk in person.

Topics covered by the talks and workshops included data science, machine learning (e.g. deep learning), CPython, Python core development, Python in web development, Python extensions in other languages (Rust, Go), Testing, building bots with Python and getting Python ready for production. The range of topics permitted a bit of something for everyone.

We at PythonDay want to thank everyone that helped make this possible. The organizers spent many months talking, planning, getting funds and convincing people that Mexico is a great place for Python. The PSF was a major player in the making of this event, given that not only were they one of our major sponsors but were also a wonderful source of speakers, advice and even promotion of the event. Of course the speakers and volunteers were also a huge part of the success of this event. Finally, the event would not have been possible without the attendees, without them the event would only have been a bunch of speakers and swag.

What’s next?

Our mission after PythonDay Mexico is to bring a PyCon to Mexico and to keep connecting all the people interested in Python within Mexico with programming and events. For PyConMx we are actively seeking volunteers and organizers, if you'd like to help us or learn more you can contact us at pythonday.mx@gmail.com or mx@pyladies.com, we really hope to hear from you!

2017-08-30T13:54:00.000-04:00

Python in Nigeria

In 2015, the PSF sponsored the first Python event in Nigeria - the Codesses Workshop in Lagos. In 2016, the number of events increased to 13, and there have been 28 events funded so far in 2017! What has happened in the last 2 ½ years to create such a demand for learning Python in this part of the world?

Aisha Bello

I spoke with Aisha Bello about this. She serves as vice-chair for the Python Nigeria community. She has helped co-organize and support a number of Django Girls workshops in Namibia and Nigeria, and also co-organizes PyLadies Nigeria. Aisha is enthusiastic about the Python community, with a strong desire and passion for social change, women’s tech education and empowerment in Africa. She currently works as an Associate Systems Engineer for Cisco Systems.

Chukwudi Nwachukwu

Sharing his thoughts as well, is Chukwudi Nwachukwu, PSF Board Director, and Team Lead Integrations, TechAdvance. He is also a volunteer member of the PSF Grants Work Group, helping to review requests from Africa and all over the world. He has also been invited to speak at PyCon NG in September. When I asked why he’s passionate about Python, he said, “Python is easy on the brain and I thank Guido [van Rossum]for such a concept.”

Python + Community

Smart Girls Project

According to Aisha, Python is popular in Nigeria because it’s one of the easiest ways to learn programming. Knowing how to code opens up many career options. The advantages of open source software are becoming more well-known in this region, and have allowed the community to grow because they’re not tied to any one vendor. She notes: “What we have is community. It means a lot to people that there is a common place or forum where they’re not afraid to share their struggles and ideas with people with like minds. We took the Python language and community and made it our own.”

Django Girls Lagos

Chukwudi believes that “the recent urge for more women to be in the workforce of Nigeria through IT has been a huge factor in the growth of Python programming. The Federal Government of Nigeria has also keyed into this drive by choosing Flask as a framework of choice to be taught in their Npower programme.” In addition, Django Girls events nationwide, startup companies incorporating Python as part of their stack, and IT companies training people to code in Python, have all made Python a leading programming language in Nigeria.

Funding for Events

Aisha and Chukwudi agree that getting funding for events in Nigeria is challenging. Often, it’s startups that come forward to help sponsor events. Aisha believes that “By creating more awareness and putting ourselves more out there, we’re hopeful things will change. Organizations like Github, the PSF, and the Django Software Foundation believe in us, and sponsor our events even when no one else will.”

Fortunately, the Django Girls Foundation offers help through their Organizer’s Manual and a template for how to run a workshop: the Coaching Manual. These documents provide a framework to help groups get started. Having a professional-looking proposal goes a long way toward convincing organizations to support these events.

Positive Outcomes

Many of the participants of these workshops have gone into IT careers, received internships, become mentors, organized workshops, and are actively involved in helping out the community. Outreach to girls in primary and high schools is working too. Girls are learning to program in Python, and most importantly, they’re learning how to use the tools to continue in their journey toward a career.

One very real example is what Abocoders did in collaboration with DjangoGirls in Lagos. Girls who had been displaced from their homes due to Bokoharam in the North were able to learn about computers and programming. In addition, they each got a refurbished computer to use during and after the workshop.

#GirlCodersRock came out of one of the events. An attendee of a Django Girls event in Nigeria is now an intern at TechAdvance, where Chukwudi works. She’s now coding Python full time. There are many Python-related jobs being advertised right now in Nigeria - Google Nigeria and Upperlink are hiring, and Alljobs.ng has 40+ listings. It looks like the trend will continue.

Chukwudi has seen a large increase in members both on slack channels and mailing lists. The community is very excited about the first PyCon Nigeria, September 15-16, 2017, in Lagos. It’s the largest gathering for the Python community in Nigeria, and is organised by members of the Python Users Nigeria Group, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to advancing and promoting the use of the Python programming language in the country.

Django Girls Lagos

Chukwudi suggested that I speak with a woman he mentors, Hamdalah Adetunji, about her road to a career in programming. She explained: “It is all a step towards growth and progress, but I hope one day in the near future, I get to do more than wish I wasn't the only female on the team. I hope to mentor women to give back the amazing support I have received all through my journey, and also let them know they can be anything they want to be as long as they are focused and determined."

The Ethical Maintainer: Community Service Award Recipient Glyph Lefkowitz

2017-08-10T08:30:00.000-04:00

Glyph Lefkowitz was barely 20 years old when he promised himself, "I am never going to use a proprietary programming language again!" He had been writing a Java application for his first professional programming job, which he had started directly after high school. The firm was a mom and pop shop that sold inventory software. Glyph was hired to rewrite their application for a contemporary platform: Java's Abstract Window Toolkit. With the hubris of the young, he promised, "Sure, I can rewrite your whole application in a new language." He could do it working only four days a week, too, and make time to work on his multiplayer online game.

"I had a pretty terrible experience with Java," he says. In those early days of the Java AWT, on classic Mac OS it leaked a tiny bit of memory every time it opened and closed a window, and in his application, nearly every task a user desired required opening and closing a window. On the constrained Macs of the time, the application would crash after about 100 tasks, often taking the whole OS down with it. The AWT was proprietary, so there was no way to fix the bug himself. "I was fired," says Glyph, "because I was having a nervous breakdown over this."

The Birth of Twisted

Meanwhile, Glyph was also building his multi-user text adventure in Java. He wanted to rapidly experiment with varied gameplay logic, and to avoid constantly restarting the server as he tried new code, he built a system in Java that could load new modules at runtime. When, burned by his Java defeat, he switched to Python, he found that practically all of the Java code required to load modules and execute them simply disappeared.

The switch from Java to Python had another effect, which profoundly determined the direction of Glyph's career. He discovered async.

Glyph's friend James Knight, who would become an original contributor to Twisted, helped with the Python port. The initial code for the Python server ran a thread per player, but Knight used a select call to determine, within each thread, whether it was time to read a message from the player or send one. When young Glyph saw that code he was astonished. "It's doing two things at once! But it's also kind of one thing." After all the bugs he'd battled in his multithreaded Java, he thought, "Couldn't we just do one thing all the time?" He and Knight rewrote the entire game server as a single-threaded event loop. He liked how it simplified the code. Only one thread accessed a shared data structure at a time. His original motivation to use an event loop was not efficiency: rather, it was how much easier it was to make his code correct.

Glyph says that his strength, in his 20s, was knowing what he didn't know. His father is a programmer, and he taught Glyph that most programming techniques are already well-known. Therefore when Glyph and James Knight got their event loop working, Glyph thought, "Someone must have done this before." He searched on Alta Vista and found the ACE project, which included a C++ event loop. Glyph refined his Python event loop based on the best practices he found in ACE, and this became the basis for Twisted, which is now one of the oldest and most influential of all Python libraries.

Based on this early experience discovering that event loops were a well-known technique, Twisted's motto is "no new ideas allowed." Twenty years later, however, Glyph has begun to innovate on the margins. For example, his Tubes library implements asynchronous I/O as "flows" of data with flow control and backpressure. But when it comes to event loops, he says, "There's so much prior art that coming up with new inventions is not worthwhile."

Twisted's Influence On Python

In the second quarter of 2017, the Python Software Foundation recognized Glyph Lefkowitz with a Community Service Award for his work on Twisted and his contributions to the Python community. Nick Coghlan nominated him, saying that Twisted "predates almost all other Python event handling systems by years, and still has by far the most comprehensive set of network protocol handlers." The decade-long journey from PEP 342's generators-as-coroutines, which enabled Twisted's inlineCallbacks feature and Tornado's Futures, to native coroutine support with "async" and "await", began with Twisted. Coghlan says that evolution could be reasonably described as taking the concepts first embodied in Twisted and drawing them ever closer to the center of the language.

In 2012, Guido van Rossum began writing asyncio, an async framework for the Python standard library. He collaborated closely with Glyph, as well as Tornado's maintainer Ben Darnell, to incorporate their best ideas in asyncio. He was interested in Twisted's notion of a Deferred, but he couldn't seem to understand it. Glyph says that trying to explain Deferred to Guido "was the worst time I've ever had on a mailing list." Guido wrote, "I really don't get Deferreds. Don't bother pointing me to docs or tutorials; I tried and failed." He said that Glyph's "snarky tone is seriously affecting my ability to process your response." Then he went silent for a week.

Glyph was devastated. He felt like he'd been flamed and ghosted by the founder of the language itself. Then Guido suddenly returned to the mailing list, with what Glyph calls "the most trenchant and keenly observed critique of the Deferred module. It was possibly the best code review I've ever received." It was suddenly clear that Twisted's Deferred would interoperate just fine with the new asyncio event loop. "We were all on board."

Responsibilities of Open Source Programmers

Glyph is distinct among Python programmers for his outspoken views on ethics. In his 2015 PyCon talk he proposed that programmers write a code of ethics, similar to other professions such as medicine and journalism. If we don't, he says, "someone else is going to do it for us, and they are not going to understand our field well enough to do it correctly." Since software is eating the world and it influences nearly all economic activity, we have a grave obligation to write code ethically.

Open source programmers often think we owe our users nothing, because we give away code for free. But this attitude ignores the benefits that we've gained. "Being an open source maintainer has opened all sorts of doors for me," says Glyph. "Whenever anyone does anything with Twisted the credit accrues to me. That's not really accurate, because there are lots of other maintainers like Amber Brown, David Reid, Ashwini Oruganti, Jean-Paul Calderone, Moshe Zadka, and Christopher Armstrong." Regardless, anyone who releases open source code engages in a subtle exchange with users, which obliges the coder to uphold some responsibilities. In my conversation with him, Glyph identified three responsibilities for open source programmers: to make clear promises, to secure our code, and to release code of appropriate quality.

Open source maintainers are uniquely obliged to make clear promises. If a maintainer abandons a project, her main obligation is to announce her departure and to transfer control. "Being an open-source maintainer is not a life sentence," says Glyph. But it is irresponsible to make a worthy piece of software, gain users, then disappear without a word.

We also have a responsibility to protect our personal information security; for example, a Python project maintainer must protect her PyPI account so her users know they won't be hacked when they install her package. That responsibility is shared with the community's infrastructure maintainers, and Glyph cites PyPI as one of the best modern examples. "It doesn't get enough credit because of Python's checkered history with packaging," he says, "but the way Donald Stufft thinks about practical information security, and the other folks who work on PyPI as well, and the resources the PSF has invested there," have laid a foundation for securely distributing open source Python.

And finally, many of us set a low bar for the quality of code that we release: if the project scratched our own itch, we might as well open-source it. In Glyph's opinion, we must more carefully consider the impact of the code we give away, because we can't predict how it will be used. Glyph knows that many of the largest sites run Twisted somewhere in their stack, and he feels the responsibility keenly.

"A lot of our software completely escapes its originating context," says Glyph. The author might intend to release a mere prototype, but downstream packagers come to depend on her code, and other programmers even farther downstream might not know they depend on it at all. Of course, software users share some responsibility for auditing what code they use. "This responsibility is not black or white," says Glyph. "There's small tradeoffs and fractional proportions. It's not 100% yours or not, but you've got to think about it."

2017 Bylaw Changes

2017-07-24T10:00:00.000-04:00

The PSF has changed its bylaws, following a discussion and vote among the voting members. I'd like to publicly explain those changes.

For each of the changes, I will describe 1.) what the bylaws used to say prior to June 2017 2.) what the new bylaws say and 3.) why the changes were implemented.

Certification of Voting Members

What the bylaws used to say

Every member had to acknowledge that they wanted to vote/or not vote every year.

What the bylaws now say

The bylaws now say that the list of voters is based on criteria decided upon by the board.

Why was this change made?

The previous bylaws pertaining to this topic created too much work for our staff to handle and sometimes it was not done because we did not have the time resources to do it. We can now change the certification to something more manageable for our staff and our members.

Voting in New PSF Fellow Members

What the bylaws used to say

We did not have a procedure in place for this in the previous bylaws.

What the bylaws now say

Now the bylaws allow any member to nominate a Fellow. Additionally, it gives the chance for the PSF Board to create a work group for evaluating the nominations.

Why was this change made?

We lacked a procedure. We had several inquiries and nominations in the past, but did not have a policy to respond with. Now that we voted in this bylaw, the PSF Board voted in the creation of the Work Group. We can now begin accepting new Fellow Members after several years.

Staggered Board Terms

What the bylaws used to say

We did not have staggered board terms prior to June 2017. Every director would be voted on every term.

What the bylaws now say

The bylaws now say that in the June election, the top 4 voted directors would hold 3 year terms, the next 4 voted-in directors hold 2 year terms and the next 3 voted-in directors hold 1 year terms. That resulted in:

Naomi Ceder (3 yr)
Eric Holscher (3 yr)
Jackie Kazil (3 yr)
Paul Hildebrandt (3 yr)
Lorena Mesa (2 yr)
Thomas Wouters (2 yr)
Kushal Das (2 yr)
Marlene Mhangami (2 yr)
Kenneth Reitz (1 yr)
Trey Hunner (1 yr)
Paola Katherine Pacheco (1 yr)

Why was this change made?

The main push behind this change is continuity. As the PSF continues to grow, we are hoping to make it more stable and sustainable. Having some directors in place for more than one year will help us better complete short-term and long-term projects. It will also help us pass on context from previous discussions and meetings.

Direct Officers

What the bylaws used to say

We did not have Direct Officers prior to June 2017.

What the bylaws now say

The bylaws state that the current General Counsel and Director of Operations will be the Direct Officers of the PSF. Additionally, they state that the Direct Officers become the 12th and 13th members of the board giving them rights to vote on board business. Direct Officers can be removed by a.) fail of an approval vote, held on at least the same schedule as 3-year-term directors; b) leave the office associated with the officer director position; or c) fail a no-confidence vote.

Why was this change made?

In an effort to become a more stable and mature board, we are appointing two important positions to be directors of the board. Having the General Counsel and Director of Operations on the board helps us have more strength with legal situations and how the PSF operates. The two new Direct Officers are:

Van Lindberg
Ewa Jodlowska

Delegating Ability to Set Compensation

What the bylaws used to say

The bylaws used to state that the President of the Foundation would direct how compensation of the Foundation’s employees was decided.

What the bylaws now say

The bylaws have changed so that the Board of Directors decide how employee compensation is decided.

Why was this change made?

This change was made because even though we keep the president informed of major changes, Guido does not participate in day to day operations nor employee management. We wanted the bylaws to clarify the most effective and fair way we set compensation for our staff.

We hope this breakdown sheds light on the changes and why they were important to implement. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns.

Welcome New Board Members

2017-07-17T07:30:00.000-04:00

The PSF is thrilled to welcome six new board members, chosen on June 11 during the 2017 PSF Board Election. The PSF would not be what it is without the expertise and diversity of our board, and we look forward to seeing what our new members accomplish this quarter. Read on to learn more about them and their initial goals as PSF Board Members.

Paul Hildebrandt has been a Senior Engineer with Walt Disney Animation Studios since 1996. He resides outside of Los Angeles with his wife and three boys. In his first quarter, he hopes to serve the Python community by better understanding the well-oiled machine that is the PSF and by handling regular board activity. He desires to contribute by focusing on sponsorship and corporate involvement opportunities.

Eric Holscher is co-founder of Read the Docs and Write the Docs, where he works

to elevate the status of documentation in the software industry. He has hiked 800 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, and spends most of his spare time in the woods or traveling the world. His wish is to focus on sustainability and to create a new initiative that will bring in sponsors who are focused on the sustainability of the ecosystem such as PyPI, Read the Docs, and pip.

Marlene Mhangami is the director and co-founder of ZimboPy, an organization that teaches Zimbabwean girls how to code in Python. Through her organization she has worked with the organizers of Django Girls Chinoyi and Harare, as well as PyCon Zimbabwe to grow the use of Python locally. Her goals for the quarter are to help connect, support, and represent issues relevant to Pythonistas in Africa. She will seek to increase the number of PyCons in the region and facilitate the inclusion of women and other underrepresented groups.

Paola Katherine Pacheco is a backend Python developer and organizer of Python groups such as PyLadies Brazil, PyLadies Rio de Janeiro, Django Girls Rio de Janeiro, Pyladies Mendoza and Python Mendoza. She runs a YouTube channel where she teaches Python in Portuguese. Her goals this quarter are to energize Python events for the Brazilian and Argentine Python communities, and to increase diversity by promoting education and events to women and underrepresented groups.

Kenneth Reitz is the product owner of Python at Heroku. He is well-known for his many open source software projects, specifically Requests: HTTP for Humans. He seeks to contribute towards the PSF's continued optimization of its operations, increase its sustainability, and the sustainability of the entire Python ecosystem.

Thomas Wouters is a long-time CPython core developer and a founding PSF member. He has worked at Google since 2006, maintaining the internal Python infrastructure. His immediate goal is to get reacquainted with the PSF procedures and the matters the board attends to, both of which have changed a lot since he last served on the Board of Directors. Longer term, he would like to work on the awareness of the practical side of the Python community: the website, mailing lists, and other help channels like IRC, as well as actual code development and services like PyPI.

2017 Frank Willison Memorial Award Goes To Katie Cunningham And Barbara Shaurette

2017-05-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

Every year the Python Software Foundation awards the Frank Willison Memorial Award to a member(s) of the Python community. The purpose of this award is to recognize the outstanding contributions that Python community members have made having began as an award, “established in memory of Frank Willison, a Python enthusiast and O'Reilly editor-in-chief, who died in July 2001”.

The Python Software Foundation has awarded the 2017 Frank Willison Award to Katie Cunningham and Barbara Shaurette in recognition of their work creating Young Coders classes. Cunningham and Shaurette have gone above and beyond making the Young Coders teaching materials freely available.

The program began at PyCon 2013 in Santa Clara and was an immediate success. The follow-up blog post is the second most popular post in PyCon's history by a wide margin. Additionally the event was one of the most talked about topics of the 2013 conference.

Lynn Root and Jesse Noller pitched the idea to Cunningham asking her to lead it. Cunningham then reached out to Shaurette seeking her assistance, or as she said, “Omg help!”

Shaurette has experience teaching early childhood education. Her experience teaching younger students came in handy as she reworked materials used for adult classes into the materials the program uses today. The class includes Raspberry Pis, keyboards, and a mouse that the students were allowed to take with them, along with two books Python for Kids and Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners.

The first class for students aged 10 to 12 did not go without hitches. That year there were a lot of technical issues with the Raspberry Pis. Noah Kantrowitz saved the day helping Cunningham and Barbara getting the Raspberry Pi’s set up. “The setup is a little complex, but he set the guidelines for what equipment we use, and how we plan the classroom every year,” Shaurette said.

“There were moments setting up that I said, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work,” Cunningham recalls.

That first class was eight hours. Then Katie and Barbara wrapped up and did it again the next day for a second a time with a whole new class.

By the end of the first day it was already a noted success. “The enthusiasm around it was insane. People were so excited that we were doing it. We were off in our own corner and not central to the conference, but people were stopping by and peeking in,” Cunningham explains.

Once the kids were let loose to experiment, they tried all sorts of things. “I don't think you'd ever see that kind of experimentation in a classroom full of adults, who would more likely do everything in their power not to break their computers,” Shaurette wrote of the kids’ ability to learn, write, and run code.

The second day was a whole new class, but this time it was a group of 13 to 16 year olds, and just as successful. “One thing that I find is how energizing the kids get at the end,” Cunningham said.

Not long after that, Young Coders was approached by the PyOhio and PyTennessee organizers. Both conferences have held Young Coders nearly every year since. Brad Montgomery has taken over responsibility in PyTennessee, but Cunningham still runs the workshop at PyOhio.

Since the start of the program Cunningham and Shaurette have taught over 400 kids!

We thank Cunningham and Shaurette for their work in actively promoting and teaching Python to a new generation of programmers.

Attending PyCon 2017? Consider Becoming a Sponsor!

2017-05-04T10:30:00.000-04:00

As PyCon approaches, we would like to invite attendees and members of our community to join the Python Software Foundation as a sponsor. Your generous support enables the PSF’s mission to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language.

Thanks to our current sponsors, some of our recent accomplishments include:

Organizing successful PyCons. Last year’s event brought together 3,388 attendees from 49 countries, a new record for PyCon! Our sponsors’ support enabled us to award $94,000.00 USD in financial aid to 142 attendees who would not otherwise have been able to attend. This year we were able to expand upon our financial aid by awarding $111,653.00 USD to 194 attendees.
Hiring more staff. In addition to adding more blog writers to keep the public aware of the most recent PSF news, we have added an IT Manager to help maintain our growing infrastructure, as well as an additional accountant to deal with the high demand of requests for financial support from all over the world.

Funding great projects. So far this year we have approved $70,000.00 USD in grants to over 60 events. At this rate 2017 will surpass last year’s total of $265,000.00 USD in grants to 137 events in 45 different countries.

Acknowledging awesome Python contributors. Community Service Awards are given out quarterly, honoring individuals who support our mission. Read about recent CSA recipients on our blog.
Implementing a Python Ambassador program. This program provides funding for ambassadors to travel locally to perform Python outreach. This is currently in trial mode in South America and is going very well. If the trend continues, we will expand this program to additional locales.

We plan to continue our efforts in the coming years by developing fiscal sponsorship support for Python projects, implementing a Customer Relationship Management system to better communicate with individual PSF members, and continuing to support Python programmers worldwide.

We love to hear from happy sponsors about why they contribute to the PSF. Here are what a few have to say:

"ActiveState is proud to be a founding member and continued supporter of PSF. We recognize how important Python is for developers, IT administrators and data scientists--it continues to evolve and grow in popularity as a very powerful language with many use cases. We're excited about its future and helping the foundation's goal in advancing the language."

- Bart Copeland, ActiveState President & CEO

“Sponsoring PSF brings tremendous opportunities for the entire Python community to actively participate, connect, and engage in many meaningful ways. It’s an opportunity to enrich the language by encouraging active dialogue on future directions, and to nurture compelling new ideas and projects, support the accompanying logistics and infrastructure needs, and uphold the open source values of the community. Intel continues to foster innovation with Python and is committed to contributing to the growth of this vibrant ecosystem.”

- Sonali DeSouza, Product Manager - Intel® Python & Scripting tools team

“‘Work on stuff that matters’ is one of O’Reilly’s core principles, and we know how very much open source matters. The open source community spurs innovation, shares knowledge, encourages growth, and creates industries. The Python Software Foundation is a prime example of the power of open source, showing how focused, thoughtful, and consistent efforts can create a community whose impact extends far beyond meetups and lines of code. O'Reilly is proud to continue to sponsor this great foundation."

- Rachel Roumeliotis, Strategic Content Director at O'Reilly and Chair of OSCON

“Delivering digital projects in Python is the core of our business; it solves the needs of our clients. The PSF does a fantastic job of protecting and investing in the future of Python. Sponsoring the PSF is how we not only give back for the past, but also protect our future.”

- Steve Hawkes, Director, Blanc LTD

If you value what we do at PSF, we hope that you too will consider becoming a sponsor. For details about PSF Sponsorship and to get started, please visit our Sponsors page.

Brian Costlow, “the quietly amazing rock” Python volunteer: Community Service Award Recipient

2017-04-27T10:30:00.000-04:00

Brian began volunteering unofficially, when he threw out a pile of pizza boxes. He was at PyOhio in 2009 when, as Brian recalls, “Lunch was delivered pizza and the organizers had to clean up after the conference. I felt bad that I had attended a great event, entirely free, so I started to help them sweep the floors and throw away the pizza boxes." The next two years Brian worked the conference as a volunteer. In 2012 he joined the organizing committee and he went on to chair the conference in 2014, 2015, and 2016.

The Python Software Foundation is pleased to present Brian Costlow with the 2017 Quarter 1 Community Service Award for:

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation award the 2017 Q1 Community Service Award to Brian Costlow for his work organizing PyOhio, chairing PyOhio, and for being the head volunteer for PyCon US captioning.

A Jack-Of-All-Trades PyOhio Organizer

“I was working in IT for a large printing and media company when I started to use Python for a number of projects. I joined the Ohio Python Mailing List and when the planning for the first PyOhio began, I made plans to attend,” Brian recalls. Regrettably Brian was unable to attend the inaugural PyOhio conference. He did, however, attend the second PyOhio, where his volunteerism began with a simple act of cleaning empty pizza boxes. Since 2010 Brian has worked alongside PyOhio organizers like Catherine Devlin and Eric Floehr, the founder of the Central Ohio Python User Group, chairing the conference, recruiting workshops, seeking new speakers.

Katie Cunningham, one of the leaders of the Young Coders project, first met Brian when he invited Young Coders to join PyOhio. During their first year Young Coders encountered a few technical hiccups. Cunningham recalls, “Brian wasn’t fazed. He helped keep the room together." She adds that “he is one of those quietly amazing people who quickly goes from someone you know to someone you couldn't do without. In an industry rife with people who tend to be a bit flighty, he's a rock”.

On a personal note, I first attended PyOhio in 2015 as both an inaugural speaker and attendee. I was terrified. Following my talk I had the pleasure to meet Brian. He was excited to hear about my experience as a novice speaker and we continued our discussion after the conference. Brian has been continuously interested in learning how to recruit more women and underrepresented individuals to both attend and speak at PyOhio. What makes PyOhio unique as a place to begin one’s speaking or Python career is the simple fact that PyOhio is free to attend. According to Brian, PyOhio never deliberately set out to be accessible, “it just happened organically because the Python community really is a community, and we all wanted to give back to the community that gave so much to us”.

Continuing to Give Back at PyCon through Captioning

Brandon Rhodes, PyCon 2016 and 2017 chair, reached out to Brian a year early in 2015 seeking assistance with captioning. Brian, mindful of Rhodes's support for PyOhio, says, “Brandon has always been a great friend to PyOhio. So when he was selected as chair for PyCon 2016 and 2017, I reached out and said if there was anything I could help him with, I would gladly do it."

Captioning was a remote volunteer position in 2015. “Brian first helped out in Montreal and then took the lead in 2016 at Portland. Every year Brian takes part in the process, takes careful observations, and notes what works and what doesn’t,” Ewa Jodlowska explains. Given some of Brian’s feedback and other lessons learned at 2015 the PyCon organizing team opened to turn the captioning position into a staff position. “We learn lots year after year and make several improvements thanks to Brian's involvement,” Jodlowska adds.

Brian continues to work with the captioning staff team. He says, “If someone wants to get involved, just reach out to Ewa or me, we're always open to suggestions for improvement!"

Brian Costlow, by his willingness to work behind the scenes on jobs big and small, demonstrates the spirit of Python's community. It’s about supporting one another and always looking forward to doing things better and bigger that makes the community so vibrant.

Look for Brian at PyCon 2017! He may just want to share with you some exciting ways you can help with PyCon captioning in the future.

Community Service Award Recipient Ian Cordasco

2017-04-21T07:00:00.000-04:00

The Python Software Foundation depends on its board of directors in order to function. Board members are elected every year by PSF voting members in a process run internally by non-board members. Ian Cordasco has been the PSF’s Election Administrator since 2015, volunteering his efforts for this important role. Cordasco is also a valuable member of the Python community, frequently mentoring newer coders and supporting their Python endeavors. For these reasons, the PSF is delighted to award the 2017 QA Community Service award to Ian Cordasco:

RESOLVED that the Python Software Foundation award the 2017 Q1 Community Service Award to Ian Cordasco for his contributions to PSF elections and active mentoring of women in Python community.

PSF Elections

Cordasco began as the PSF’s Election Administrator during a time of turmoil. “The first year I ran the election was something of a nightmare,” he recalls. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the previous Election Administrator stepped down on short notice and was unavailable to relaunch the election efforts. “Many people did not get ballots via email as they should. Some people were accidentally excluded from the voting rolls. Further, there was a lot of confusion because I stepped in at the last minute.” Without the aid of documentation and prior experience, Ian threw himself into the cause. The PSF has since reviewed, solidified, and documented the election procedures.

Since his dramatic start as Elections Administrator, Cordasco’s work with PSF elections has been much smoother. Mark Mangoba, PSF’s IT Manager, works closely with Cordasco during the election process. Mangoba notes, “Ian is a great volunteer. He does an excellent job with the elections, assuring that all votes are accounted for and that there is no fraud or issues of any kind.” Cordasco has also gotten creative with how he manages elections. For example, to reduce bias, he uses Python code to break ties and to randomize the order in which candidates appear to voters. Additionally, those that work with Cordasco describe him as an enjoyable collaborator. Mangoba explains, “Ian is energetic and thoughtful. His passion and enthusiasm for the PSF shows through, he’s always available to help and answer questions.”

Mentoring

Cordasco has a history of going out of his way to support and encourage female developers. When Carol Willing, a developer for the Jupyter project, wanted to work on the Requests library, she got in touch with Cordasco. “We worked together on the project and my first commit to the Requests library got accepted!” Cordasco later wrote a fantastic post about it on his blog.

Cordasco has also found newer coders to mentor at Python events, such as Anna Ossowski. “I met Ian at PyTennessee 2015, a day before I was scheduled to give my very first ever conference talk. Ian’s encouragement and support helped me a lot and it’s thanks to him and Carol [Willing] that I had the confidence to go up on stage and deliver my talk.” But his support didn’t stop there, Ossowski goes on to say, “every week he would reserve an hour for me where we would program together, he would answer questions, and just generally help me with any programming issues I experienced. Ian helped me get the PyLadies Remote website up and running, something I would have never managed without his help.”

Adrienne Lowe, a developer at Emma, has also enjoyed Cordasco’s support and encouragement. She recalls, “He models the kind of developer that we all want to be in terms of being encouraging and open.” She continues, “he sets himself apart by being genuine, welcoming, and happy to explain anything from simple things to more complex concepts, all in an ego-less way.”

The Python community as a whole is very lucky to count Cordasco as its member, and we hope he continues to help others contribute and achieve their goals.

CSA 2017 Q1 Winner Ian Cordasco

In his free time, you can find Cordasco blogging on his website, riding his bike, or reading books.

Pay What You Want for "The Humble Book Bundle: Python" and Benefit the PSF

2017-04-05T14:00:00.000-04:00

Pay what you want for a stack of Python ebooks from No Starch Press, and decide what portion goes to the PSF. This deal is presented by Humble Bundle, which sells ebooks and games to raise money for nonprofits. When you buy a bundle you choose how much to pay, and how the money is divided among the creators, Humble Bundle, Inc., and the nonprofit organization.

The Humble Book Bundle: Python is available now through April 19th. Pay a dollar or more for these three books:

If you choose to pay $8 or more, you also receive:

If you pay more than $15 you get all of the above, plus:

To help the PSF and get a stack of fun and useful Python books at a price you decide, buy the bundle before April 19th!

Humble Book Bundle: Python

Python at Google Summer of Code: Apply by April 3

2017-03-28T23:39:00.000-04:00

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers post-secondary students an opportunity to be paid for contributing to an open source project over a three-month period. Since 2005, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) has served as an "umbrella organization" to a variety of Python-related projects, as well as sponsoring projects related to the development of the Python language.

April 3rd is the last date for student applications for GSoC 2017. You can view all the sub-orgs under PSF and see what projects are seeking applications, then go to the Google Summer of Code site to submit your application.

Questions?

Python and Google Summer of Code: Getting Started
IRC: Join the #python-gsoc channel on the Freenode server
Email: Join the gsoc-general mailing list.

To ask questions about specific projects, go to the sub-orgs page and click "Contact" under the project you want to ask about.

The student application deadline is April 3, and decisions will be announced on May 4.

Timeline for Google Summer of Code 2017

Ernest takes the call - Community Service Award Recipient Ernest Durbin III

2017-03-10T07:30:00.000-05:00

The day was October 23, 2015, Friday afternoon. The PSF and PyCon organizers were busy pulling together sponsors for the upcoming PyCon conference when suddenly, the ancient mail server 'albatross' suffered a hard disk crash. Email was down, grant requests would not go through, and PyCon planning was at a stand still. To make matters worse, most of the volunteers who had helped set up the initial mail server were away. Something had to be done, and fast. Ernest Durbin, a volunteer systems admin, took the call. With no documentation on how to fix the existing mail server, he worked diligently through the weekend to rebuild it. Thanks to Ernest’s hard work and dedication, the PSF and PyCon US were able to resume operations before the following Monday.

For his enthusiasm and years of volunteering, the Python Software Foundation awards the 4th Quarter 2016 Community Service Award to Ernest Durbin III:

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation award the 4th Quarter 2016 Community Service Award to Ernest W. Durbin III. Ernest has been a dedicated volunteer of the PSF for several years. Countless times he has triaged PSF infrastructure. Beyond that, Ernest has been a key person in creating structure for our infrastructure. Not only does that include internal infrastructure such as mail.python.org, that also includes external infrastructure such as PyPI. Recently, Ernest has also accepted the position of PyCon 2017 US co-chair and PyCon 2018/19 conference chair.

Durbin’s involvement in PSF began in 2012. He recalls, “A friend of mine submitted a proposal and we were selected for the task.” After a few months of doing paid work for the PSF, he realized that he would be more comfortable volunteering his time, and has been doing so ever since. “Ernest has been a huge help with the growth of PSF's infrastructure,” says Ewa Jodlowska, Director of Operations at PSF. “[He] ensures that we are keeping best practices and that the knowledge of proper processes is passed on. I am grateful that he has been able to lend his expertise in such a way.”

In addition to providing volunteer technical support for the PSF, Durbin has also become a Python community organizer. He will serve as co-chair of PyCon 2017 and has taken on the responsibilities of full conference chair for PyCon 2018 and 2019. He is also an organizer for his local Python meetup group.

When asked about why Durbin chooses to promote Python and the PSF Durbin responded, “Python has been my language of choice for most of my career,” adding that he “has always appreciated the great breadth and depth of experience in the Python community as represented by the available packages on PyPI. It is such a testament to the community's collective knowledge and generosity when nine times out of ten you can find something that fulfills your need.”

As for the email server incident, Durbin simply brushes off the stress explaining “it was a great way to meet new folks in the Python community and work with them towards a common goal.”

Ernest Durbin, CSA Winner 2016 Q4

When not programming, you can find Durbin out in his garage working on his 1960’s era SAABs or hosting Taco Tuesdays for large groups of friends.

Discovering the Python Community in Zimbabwe at their first PyCon

2017-02-10T10:30:00.000-05:00

On the heels of attending a successful PyCon in Namibia in 2015, a small group of Python enthusiasts in Harare, Zimbabwe vowed to organize the first-ever PyCon held in Zimbabwe.

After months of planning on November 25th, 2016 they achieved their goal in dramatic fashion with an enormously successful sold-out conference at the ZESA National Training Center in Harare. I was privileged to give the keynote to an extremely attentive audience. For an hour, we had a tremendous time in discussing how to contribute to open-source successfully and how to grow ideas into successful open-source projects.

In all my years of speaking, I've never had such an incredible audience. Often at technical conferences audience members are more engaged with their smartphones than the speaker. Not so at PyConZim! Questions were thoughtful and engaging. Truly a pleasure.

Throughout the conference many enjoyable talks were given. I enjoyed Dennis Murekachiro's inspiring talk on how to be a game-changer as he encouraged Zimbabwe technologists not to settle for "good enough" but to work hard to use technology to better themselves and the communities they live in. Tendai Marengerke's talk on how to create reproducible research in Python was absolutely fascinating; it's a must-watch for anybody using Python in an academic setting.

Petrus Janse van Rensburg from South Africa gave an outstanding overview of challenges that low-bandwidth connections create in Africa and how he is working to solve them by re-designing the way e-commerce platforms operate. I can virtually guarantee we'll be hearing a more about him and his work in the coming months and years.

One of the most astonishing things about PyConZim is the way in which every single attendee is brilliant and, without fail, engaged with pragmatic ideas about how to use Python to make a better life for their communities. One could go to every PyCon on Earth and never find one as inspiring as PyCon Zimbabwe.

The highlight for me, though, was having the chance to meet Marlene Hangami and Ronald Maravanyika.

Marlene and Ronald have single-handedly started an organization to teach Python to young girls across Zimbabwe.

Fueled by a desire to simply improve the lives of girls in their country, they've started free workshops in community centers and now operate in over forty community centers across the country.

They've had to battle a number of difficult obstacles that would discourage most people but they're continuing on.

As a direct result of my trip to PyConZim, I've started working with Ronald and Marlene to start a program to bring female software developers to Zimbabwe to work with selected girls on Python-based projects to help out in their communities.

Mentors participate in projects that girls work on by volunteering as little as four hours of their time and conduct their mentorship via video-conference and email. It's a very simple way to advance the case for women in technology in Africa and beyond. More information on mentorship programs and application information is available here.

My humble thanks to everybody at the Python Software Foundation for sponsoring my trip to Zimbabwe and for sponsoring the conference itself.

Pythonistas (and a Python!) at PyCon Jamaica

2017-02-03T10:30:00.000-05:00

This past November marked the first PyCon Jamaica. Held in the capital, Kingston, the conference began on November 17th with a day of tutorials followed by a single track of talks on November 18th. I attended both as a representative of the Python Software Foundation, which sponsored the conference, and as a speaker.

Python in Kingston’s Higher Education

Kingston, home to approximately 33% of Jamaicans, boasts several institutions of higher learning including the Caribbean Maritime Institute and the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies. PyCon Jamaica kicked off with tutorials at the University of the West Indies. Most of the tutorials focused on introductory topics (e.g. Introduction to Plone). Participants came from a wide range of backgrounds including mechanical engineers or undergraduates with a marketing concentration. Interestingly I was informed Python isn’t a part of the standard computer science offering at the university yet it has become a language of considerable interest in many of Kingston’s professional sectors.

David Bain, organizer of PyCon Jamaica and the local Python Jamaica user group, explained that he thinks the interest in Python has risen as students have become increasingly exposed to web technologies. Bain added that PyCon Jamaica is a way to help demonstrate to students and professionals the various applications Python has. "Jamaica wants to be seen as a viable source for local and North American nearshore developer talent, our event signals that software development talent is here," Bain explained.

Modernizing the Public Sector with Python

Conference talks were held at the Hope Zoo, a facility housing vast botanical gardens, a zoo, and a community center. There were three international speakers, Joir-dan Gumbs of IBM, Star Ying of the US Dept of Commerce, and myself, alongside several local speakers. The tutorials had been more student-centric, but the conference catered to those using Python in the Jamaican public sector.

A common theme from local speakers highlighted how Python has helped local professionals modernize outdated practices. Marc Murray of the Jamaican Ministry of Health described how he has used Python throughout his career of fifteen-plus years to automate processes and enable better data collection and data sharing. More than one speaker acknowledged that struggle of institutional knowledge silos in the local government. With Python, though, these knowledge silos have started to be disrupted. Agencies are able to share the same data sets with greater ease and promote transparency.

#PyConJamaica2016: Challenges #Python answers in gov't - information silos, use to inc info access, speed, remove redundancy @PythonJamaica
— Lorena Mesa (@loooorenanicole) November 18, 2016

Python's data-processing power was the star in a talk by student Dominic Mills. Mills recently completed an internship at CERN, where he built a Django prototype for debugging hardware in future experiments. Crucial to this project was not only the collection of data via Celery but the capacity to analyze it. Mills used bokeh for real time analysis of the sensor data, permitting monitoring and alarms to be raised if unfavorable conditions were found.

Collectively the speakers at PyCon Jamaica reflect how Jamaican programmers are embracing Python for data collection and analysis in a variety of specialties. Python’s open source packages and rich community support seemed to be its biggest selling points. Speaker Joir-dan Gumbs commented that, “the best part for me was the presentations of how Python is enhancing the lives of Jamaicans, as well as the networking.”

I’m excited to see what PyCon Jamaica 2017 will hold. Already the conference is rich in data science and data visualization content. After all, if PyCon Jamaica 2016 included an appearance from the Hope Zoo’s own python what will we see next? Perhaps two pythons, and of course many more Jamaican Pythonistas.

Time To Upgrade Your Python: TLS v1.2 Will Soon Be Mandatory

2017-01-31T10:30:00.000-05:00

If you're using an older Python without the most secure TLS implementation, this is the year to get serious about upgrading. Otherwise next June you may not be able to "pip install" packages from PyPI.

PyPI's maintainer Donald Stufft recently announced that python.org and related sites will begin disabling the old TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1. This change was imposed on us by our content delivery network, Fastly, in response to a change imposed on them by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. In order to continue serving websites that take credit card payments, Fastly is required to disable the old, insecure versions of TLS. Since the PSF's servers, including PyPI, use Fastly, the old versions of TLS will be disabled as well.

Fastly wrote in October 2015,

There have been serious and systemic security issues with earlier versions of TLS and its predecessor, SSL, including POODLE, Heartbleed, and LOGJAM. These threatened to break trust in fundamental methods of secure communication, exposing both you and your customers to breaches in security. The actions of the PCI DSS Council to maintain a high minimum bar are a step towards ensuring the security of all online business transactions.

There are two deadlines to upgrade your Python to a version with the latest TLS. The first comes soon, on April 30, 2017, when python.org sites without Extended Validation Certificates will stop supporting TLS 1.0 and 1.1. These sites include:

testpypi.python.org
test.pypi.org
files.pythonhosted.org

Warehouse, the future successor to PyPI, will also be affected by April's deadline, since Warehouse serves files from files.pythonhosted.org.

The more crucial deadline comes June 30, 2018. On that date all remaining python.org sites, including PyPI, will no longer support TSL 1.0 and 1.1. Older Python versions that do not implement TLSv1.2 will be prohibited from accessing PyPI.

See below for instructions to check your interpreter's TLS version. ¹

Stufft writes, "I am going to see about possibly organizing some scheduled 'brown outs' of TLSv1.0 and TLSv1.1 prior to the cut off dates to try and help folks find places that will need updates. Any scheduled brownouts will be posted to status.python.org prior to happening."

Mac users should pay special attention. So far, the system Python shipped with MacOS does not yet support TLSv1.2 in any MacOS version; beginning next June these system Pythons will no longer be able to "pip install" packages. ² Fortunately, it's easy to install a modern Python alongside the MacOS system Python. Either download Python 3.6 from python.org, or for Python 2.7 with the latest TLS, use Homebrew. Both methods of installing Python will continue working after June 2018.

1. To check your Python interpreter's TLS version, install the "requests" package and run a command. For example, for Python 2:

python2 -m pip install --upgrade requests

python2 -c "import requests; print(requests.get('https://www.howsmyssl.com/a/check', verify=False).json()['tls_version'])"

Or Python 3:

python3 -m pip install --upgrade requests

python3 -c "import requests; print(requests.get('https://www.howsmyssl.com/a/check', verify=False).json()['tls_version'])"

If you see "TLS 1.2", your interpreter's TLS is up to date. If you see "TLS 1.0" or an error like "tlsv1 alert protocol version", then you must upgrade. ↩

2. The reason Python's TLS implementation is falling behind on macOS is that Python continues to use OpenSSL, which Apple has stopped updating on macOS. In the coming year, the Python Packaging Authority team will investigate porting pip to Apple's own "SecureTransport" library as an alternative to OpenSSL, which would allow old Python interpreters to use modern TLS with pip only. "This is a non-trivial amount of effort," writes Stufft, "I'm not sure it's going to get done."

In the long run, the Python interpreter itself would easily keep up with TLS versions, if it didn't use OpenSSL on platforms like macOS and Windows where OpenSSL is not shipped with the OS. Cory Benfield and Christian Heimes propose to redesign the standard library's TLS interfaces to make it easier to swap OpenSSL with platform-native TLS implementations. ↩

“I use Python to help build the kind of world I want to live in” - Shannon Turner, Community Service Award Winner Q4

2017-01-26T07:30:00.000-05:00

Shannon Turner has been fascinated with programming since she was a child, thanks in part to her grandmother, who loved video games. Watching her grandmother play, Turner would draw pictures on paper and ask, 'Wouldn't this be cool if this were part of the game?". “Yes,” her grandmother would agree, “so you’ll need to get very good with computers if you want to make games of your own someday.”

As an adult, Turner’s interest in programming grew. She taught herself to program and attended tech events but it didn't feel right. She grew frustrated at being one of the only women in the room, being talked down to, and not taken seriously. Then, after speaking with other women at the events, she would realize that it wasn’t just her, “...[that] we all had this shared experience of being talked down to and not taken seriously. That's when I decided to start teaching other women what I'd taught myself.” This is what motivated Turner to start Hear Me Code (HMC), a group that offers free, beginner-friendly coding classes for women in the Washington DC area.

The Python Software Foundation awards the 4th Quarter 2016 Community Service Award to Shannon Turner for her work on Hear Me Code:

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation award the 4th Quarter 2016 Community Service Award to Shannon Turner. Shannon is the founder of Hear Me Code, an organization offering free, beginner-friendly Python coding classes for over 2000 women in Washington, DC. She teaches all the classes with the help of women who have previously taken the classes. She empowers hundreds of women to code with Python by lowering barriers to entry. More than just a class where women learn to build websites, Hear Me Code focuses on leadership development, peer mentoring, and turning students into teachers.

Hear Me Code

What started in 2013 as an informal class with a few friends seated at the kitchen table has grown to a group of over 2000 in the Washington DC area. Turner developed the curriculum, slides, and exercises for five lessons, making incremental changes and improvements each time she taught. In the beginning she taught all the classes herself, but quickly realized she would do even more good by helping her students become instructors themselves. To date, over 100 women who started as students have moved on to be teaching assistants and teachers in the group. “In our first two years,” says Turner, “over two dozen women credited Hear Me Code with providing them the skills and experience they needed to land a job in tech.”

At HMC, programming courses are taught with Python. Why Python? As Turner was teaching herself to code with a variety of languages, Python felt different. “I still struggled to learn it,” Turner recalls, “but it was much more intuitive than other languages I'd used.”

Helping Female Developers

HMC student Sonia Hinson started taking classes in January 2014. Since then she has completed most of the courses and moved on to being a teaching assistant and teacher. She says Turner encourages her students to become teachers by “promoting the idea that you learn best from teaching someone else programming and working with your neighbors to solve bugs and problems in code.”

Student Haynes Bunn would agree. She values Turner’s ability to identify people’s strengths and encourage students to get involved in teaching positions. By doing this, says Haynes, Turner is not just teaching women to code, “she’s also helping them to teach, to help others, and to be leaders.”

Turner would rather spend her time helping women through her networks than seek praise for all of her work. That’s not what motivates her, says Stephanie Nguyen, “her impact in the Python community and the women who she has empowered to code are all examples that speak loudly for her.”

Other Projects

“Now, in addition to running Hear Me Code,” says Turner, “I use Python to help build the kind of world I want to live in.” Some of her other projects include a visualization of 500 schools that aren't taking campus sexual assault seriously and a searchable database of 6000 museums across the US.

Shannon Turner, CSA Winner Q4

Turner lives in Washington DC with her pet bird, who she keeps tabs on with her Raspberry Pi.

Sheila Miguez and Will Kahn-Greene and their love for the Python Community: Community Service Award Quarter 3 2016 Winners

2017-01-19T10:00:00.000-05:00

There are two elements which make Open Source function:

Technology
An active community.

The primary need for a successful community is a good contributor base. The contributors are our real heroes, who work persistently, on many (if not most) occasions without any financial benefits, just for the love of the community. The Python Community is blessed with many such heroes. The PSF's quarterly Community Service Award honors these heroes for their notable contributions and dedication to the Python ecosystem.

The PSF is delighted to give the 2016 Third Quarter Community Service Award to Sheila Miguez and Will Kahn-Greene:

Sheila Miguez and William Kahn-Greene for their monumental work in creating and supporting PyVideo over the years.

Community Service Award for 3rd Quarter

Will Kahn-Greene

Taken by Erik Rose, June 2016

The PSF funds a variety of conferences and workshops throughout the year worldwide to educate people about Python. But, not everyone can attend all of these events. Two people, Sheila Miguez and Will Kahn-Greene wanted to resolve this problem for the Pythonistas. Will came up with a brilliant idea of PyVideo and Sheila later joined the mission. PyVideo works as the warehouse of videos from Python conferences, local user groups, screencasts, and tutorials.

The Dawn of PyVideo

Back in 2010, Will started a Python video site using the Miro Community video-sharing platform. PSF encouraged his work with an $1800 grant the following year. As Will recalls, "I was thinking there were a bunch of Python conferences putting out video, but they were hosting the videos in different places. Search engines weren't really finding it. It was hard to find things even if you knew where to look." He started with Miro Community, and later wrote a whole new codebase for generating the data and another codebase for the front end of the website.

With these tools he started PyVideo.org. "This new infrastructure let me build a site closer to what I was envisioning."

When Sheila joined the project she contributed both to its technology and by helping the community find Python videos easier. Originally, she intended to only work on the codebase, but found herself dedicating a lot of time to adding content to the site.

What is PyVideo?

PyVideo is a repository that indexes and links to thousands of Python videos. It also provides a website pyvideo.org where people can browse the collection, which is more than 5000 Python videos and growing. The goals for PyVideo are:

Help people get to Python presentations easier and faster
Focus on education
Data collection and categorization.
Aim to give people an easy, enjoyable experience contributing to open source on PyVideo's GitHub repo

The Community Response

The Python community has welcomed Will and Sheila's noble endeavor enthusiastically. Pythonistas around the world never have to miss another recorded talk or tutorial. Sheila and Will worked relentlessly to give shape to their mammoth task. When I asked Will about the community’s response, he said, "Many learned Python by watching videos they found on pyvideo.org. Many had ideas for different things we could do with the site and other related projects. I talked with some folks who later contributed fixes and corrections to the data."

Will and Sheila worked on pyvideo.org only in their spare time, but it has became a major catalyst in the growth of the Python community worldwide. According to Will, pyvideo.org has additional, under publicized benefits:

PyVideo is a primary source to survey diversity trends among Python conference speakers around the globe.
Since its videos are solely Python, it is easily searchable and provides more helpful results than other search engines.
It offers a preview of conferences: By watching past talks people can choose if they want to go.

PyVideo : The End?

With a blog post Will and Sheila announced the end of pyvideo.org. "I'm pretty tired of working on pyvideo and I haven't had the time or energy to do much on it in a while," Will wrote.

Though they were shutting down the site, they never wanted to lose or waste the valuable data. Will says, "In February 2016 or so, Sheila and I talked about the state of things and I just felt bad about everything. So we decided to focus on extracting the data from PyVideo and make sure that even if the site didn't live on, the data did. We wrote a bunch of tools and

infrastructure for a community of people to add to, improve and otherwise work on the data. We figured someone could take the data and build a static site around it." Will did a blog post about the status of the data of pyvideo.org, and invited new maintainers to replace the site.

The end of pyvideo.org broke the hearts of many Pythonistas, including Paul Logston. Paul’s mornings used to begin by watching a talk on the site, and he couldn't renounce his morning entertainment. He resolved to replace pyvideo.org. To begin, he wrote his project called "PyTube" for storing videos. Though initially his interest was personal, its educational outreach aspect drove him to finish and publicize the project. Sheila remembers noticing Paul for the first time when she noticed his fork of the pyvideo data repository. She was excited to see that he'd already built a static site generator based on PyVideo data. She read Paul’s development philosophy and felt he was the right person to carry on the mission.

In May 2016, at PyCon US, there was a lightning talk on PyVideo and its situation. Paul met some fellow PyVideo followers who, just like him, did not want to lose the site. They decided to work on it during the Sprints. Though the structure of the website was ready, there were a lot of things that needed to be done like data gathering, curating data, and the design of the website. So, the contributors divided the works between them.

Both Sheila and Will were committed to PyVideo's continued benefit for the community, while passing PyVideo to new hands. They were satisfied by Paul's work and transferred the domain to his control. Paul's PyTube code became the replacement of pyvideo.org on August 13, 2016.

Emergence of the Successor : The Present Status of PyVideo

Now the project has 30 contributors, with Paul serving as project lead. These contributors have kept the mission alive. Though PyVideo's aim is still the same, there is a difference in its technology. The old Django app is replaced with a static site generated with Pelican, and it now has a separate repository for data in JSON files. The team's current work emphasizes making the project hassle-free to maintain.

Listen to Paul talking about PyVideo and its future on Talk Python to Me.

The Wings to Fly

Every community needs someone with a vision for its future. Will and Sheila had showed us a path to grow and help the community. It is now our responsibility to take the new PyVideo further. Paul describes its purpose beautifully: "PyVideo's deeper 'why' is the desire to make educating oneself as easy, affordable, and available as possible." Contributors: please come and join the project, give a hand to Paul and the team to help move this great endeavor forward.

"Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neil

2017-01-04T09:00:00.000-05:00

In a 1947 lecture on computing machinery, Alan Turing made a prediction: "The new machines will in no way replace thought, but rather they will increase the need for it."

Someday, he said, machines would think for themselves, but the computers of the near future would require human supervision to prevent malfunctions:

"The intention in constructing these machines in the first instance is to treat them as slaves, giving them only jobs which have been thought out in detail, jobs such that the user of the machine fully understands in principle what is going on all the time." ¹

It is unclear now whether machines remain slaves, or if they are beginning to be masters. Machine-learning algorithms pervasively control the lives of Americans. We do not fully understand what they do, and when they malfunction they harm us, by reinforcing the unjust systems we already have. Usually unintentionally, they can make the lives of poor people and people of color worse.

In "Weapons of Math Destruction", Cathy O'Neil identifies such an algorithm as a "WMD" if it satisfies three criteria: it makes decisions of consequence for a large number of people, it is opaque and unaccountable, and it is destructive. I interviewed O'Neil to learn what data scientists should do to disarm these weapons.

Automated Injustice

Recidivism risk models are a striking example of algorithms that reinforce injustice. These algorithms purport to predict how likely a convict is to commit another crime in the next few years. The model described in O'Neil's book, called LSI-R, assesses offenders with 54 questions, then produces a risk score based on correlations between each offender's characteristics and the characteristics of recidivists and non-recidivists in a sample population of offenders.

Some of LSI-R's factors measure the offender's past behavior: Has she ever been expelled from school, or violated parole? But most factors probably aren't under the individual's control: Does she live in a high-crime neighborhood? Is she poor? And many factors are not under her control at all: Has a family member been convicted of any crimes? Did her parents raise her with a "rewarding" parenting style?

Studies of LSI-R show it gives worse scores to poor black people. Some of its questions directly measure poverty, and others (such as frequently changing residence) are proxies for poverty. LSI-R does not know the offender's race. It would be illegal to ask, but, O'Neil writes, "with the wealth of detail each prisoner provides, that single illegal question is almost superfluous." For example, it asks the offender's age when he was first involved with the police. O'Neil cites a 2013 New York Civil Liberties Union study that young black and Hispanic men were ten times as likely to be stopped by the New York City police, even though only a tiny fraction were doing anything criminal.

So far, the LSI-R does not automatically become destructive. If it is accurate, and used for benign choices like spending more time treating and counselling offenders with high risk scores, it could do some good. But in many states, judges use the LSI-R and models like it to decide how long the offender's sentence should be. This is not LSI-R's intended use, and it is certainly not accurate enough for it: a study this year found that LSI-R misclassified 41% of offenders. ²

Success, According to Whom?

O'Neil told me that whether an algorithm becomes a WMD depends on who defines success, and according to whom. "Over and over again, people act as if there's only one set of stakeholders."

When a recidivism risk model is used to sentence someone to a longer prison term, the sole stakeholder respected is law enforcement. "Law enforcement cares more about true positives, correctly identifying someone who will reoffend and putting them in jail for longer to keep them from committing another crime." But our society has a powerful interest in preventing false positives. Indeed, we were founded on a constitution that considered a false positive—that is, being punished for a crime you did not commit—to be extremely costly. Principles including the presumption of innocence, the requirement that guilt is proven beyond reasonable doubt, and so on, express our desire to avoid unjust punishment, even at the cost of some criminals being punished too little or going free.

However, this interest is ignored when an offender is punished for a bad LSI-R score. His total sentence accounts not only for the crime he committed, but also for future crimes he is thought likely to commit. Furthermore, he is punished for who he is: Being related to a criminal or being raised badly are circumstances of birth, but for many people facing sentencing, such circumstances are used to add years to their time behind bars.

Statistically Unsound

Cathy O'Neil says weapons of math destruction are usually caused by two failures. The first is when only one stakeholder's interests define success. LSI-R is an example of this. The other is a lack of actual science in data science. For these algorithms, she told me, "We actually don't have reasonable ways of checking to see whether something is working or not."

A New York City public school program begun in 2007 assessed teachers with a "value added model", which estimated how much a teacher affected each student's progress on standardized tests. To begin, the model forecast students' progress, given their neighborhood, family income, previous achievement, and so on. At the end of the year their actual progress was compared to the forecast, and the difference was attributed to the teacher's effectiveness. O'Neil tells the story of Tim Clifford, a public school teacher who scored only 6 out of 100 the first year he was assessed, then 96 out of 100 the next year. O'Neil writes, "Attempting to score a teacher's effectiveness by analyzing the test results of only twenty-five or thirty students is statistically unsound, even laughable." One analysis of the assessment showed that a quarter of teachers' scores swung by 40 points in a year. Another showed that, with such small samples, the margin of error made half of all teachers statistically indistinguishable.

Nevertheless, the score might determine if the teacher was given a bonus, or fired. Although its decision was probabilistic, appealing it required conclusive evidence. O'Neil points out that time and again, "the human victims of WMDs are held to a higher standard of evidence than the algorithms themselves." The model is math so it is presumed correct, and anyone who objects to its scores is suspect.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo put a moratorium on these teacher evaluations in 2015. We are starting to see that some questions require too subtle an intelligence for our current algorithms to answer accurately. As Alan Turing said, "If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent."

Responsible Data Science

I asked Cathy O'Neil about the responsibilities of data scientists, both in their daily work and as reformers of their profession. Regarding daily work, O'Neil drew a sharp line: "I don't want data scientists to be de facto policy makers." Rather, their job is to explain to policy makers the moral tradeoffs of their choices. The same as any programmer gathers requirements before coding a solution, data scientists should gather requirements regarding the relative cost of different kinds of errors. Machine learning algorithms are always imperfect, but they can be tweaked for either more false positives or more false negatives. When the stakes are high, the choice between the two is a moral one. Data scientists must pose these questions frankly to policy makers, says O'Neil, and "translate moral decisions into code."

Tradeoffs in the private sector often pit corporate interests against human ones. This is especially dangerous to the poor because, as O'Neil writes, "The privileged are processed more by people, the masses by machines." She told me that when the boss asks for an algorithm that optimizes for profit, it is the data scientist's duty to mention that the algorithm should also consider fairness.

"Weapons of Math Destruction" tells us how to recognize a WMD once it is built. But how can we predict whether an algorithm will become a WMD? O'Neil told me, "The biggest warning sign is if you're choosing winners and losers, and if it's a big deal for losers to lose. If it's an important decision and it's a secret formula, then that's a set-up for a weapon of math destruction. The only other ingredient you need in that setup is actually making it destructive."

Reform

Cathy O'Neil says the top priority, for data scientists who want to disarm WMDs, is to develop tools for analyzing them. For example, any EU citizen harmed by an algorithmic decision may soon have the legal right to an explanation, but so far we lack the tools to provide one. We also need tools to measure disparate impact and unfairness. O'Neil says, "We need tools to decide whether an algorithm is being racist."

New data scientists should enter the field with better training in ethics. Curricula usually ignore questions of justice, as if the job of the data scientist were purely technical. Data-science contests like Kaggle also encourage this view, says O'Neil. "Kaggle has defined the success and the penalty function. The hard part of data science is everything that happens before Kaggle." O'Neil wants more case studies from the field, anonymized so students can learn from them how data science is really practiced. It would be an opportunity to ask: When an algorithm makes a mistake, who gets hurt?

If data scientists take responsibility for the effects of their work, says O'Neil, they will become activists. "I'm hoping the book, at the very least, gets people to acknowledge the power that they're wielding," she says, "and how it could be used for good or bad. The very first thing we have to realize is that well-intentioned people can make horrible mistakes."

1. Quoted in "Alan Turing: The Enigma", by Andrew Hodges. Princeton University Press. ↩

2. See also ProPublica's analysis of bias in a similar recidivism model, COMPAS. ↩

Happy Holidays and Thank You!

2016-12-20T10:30:00.000-05:00

Happy Holidays from the Python Software Foundation!

The holiday season gets us thinking about all that we have accomplished over the past year and about those we are grateful for. This year we have kept the mission of the PSF alive by planning conferences, promoted diversity outreach, organizing workshops, and granting community service awards. We look forward to keeping it going in the year ahead!

The PSF would not be what it is today without the help of our generous sponsors. The PSF is the non-profit legal entity that holds and protects the intellectual property rights behind Python, keeping it free and open for all to use. Our sponsors' financial support aids in the PSF’s mission to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language. In addition to enabling the PSF to organize events and award grants, it allows key Python developers to focus their energy on Python development rather than on legal matters. And, donations are tax-deductible for organizations that pay taxes in the United States!

Thank you to our newest sponsors in 2016!

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In addition to our new sponsors, trusted sponsors like FusionBox keep great events like PyConUS going. We would not be able to do it without them.

To learn more about Sponsor levels and the benefits of becoming a sponsor, check out our Sponsor Info page. And finally, a huge thank you to all of our sponsors for their support throughout the years!

If you value what we do here at the PSF, please consider making a charitable donation by visiting our donations page.

Wishing everyone a safe and happy holiday season from all of us at PSF!