Maintainers Summit

The Maintainers Summit will take place on the morning of Saturday, May 4th, from 10:50am to 2:25pm in room **25C**. A part of PyCon’s [hatchery program][1], the Summit is seeking to build a community of practice for project maintainers and key contributors. We seek to help the Python community sustain and grow healthy projects and communities. Schedule -------------------- 10:50 to 11:20: Community-focused Lightning Talks 11:20-11:30: Break 11:30 to 12:00: Community-focused Lightning Talks (continued) 12:00 to 12:10: Break 12:10 to 12:55: Discussion 12:55 to 1:55: Lunch 1:55 to 2:25: Technically-focused Lightning Talks Lightning Talks -------------------- ### _Community-Focused Talks_ **From burnout to sustainability** by Eric Holscher Abstract: In 2016, I was close to quitting working on open source. I got as far as writing a blog post about quitting, but never published it. After a long, slow slog we took Read the Docs from a project without funding to a team with 5 paid staff; without compromising our morals. This talk tells the story. Bio: Co-founder of @readthedocs, @writethedocs, & @pycascades. Director @thepsf. **Wrangling enthusiastic hordes** by Katie McLaughlin Abstract: Encouraging contributors is a delicate process, but even more so when several dozen turn up to your development sprint. Katie will briefly share the experiences and strategies the BeeWare project has implemented to wrangle enthusiastic hordes of contributors. Bio: Katie is a Senior Apiarist on the BeeWare project, and was the first person to receive a Yak Shaver challenge coin. **Evolving Django core** by James Bennett Abstract: Django’s a pretty successful project, but even successful projects need to evolve, and that’s why there’s a proposal out to radically change Django’s governance. I’ll be covering the concerns that motivated this proposal, what exactly is being proposed, and how it will (hopefully) help to secure Django’s future as a project. Bio: James is a long-time contributor to and user of Django, and serves on its technical board as well as the board of the non-profit Django Software Foundation. **How can open-source projects have healthier technical discussions?** by Nathaniel J Smith Abstract: The most important activity in open-source is arguing on mailing lists and issue trackers. Good discussions produce good technical decisions. Bad discussions are a major source of trauma and burnout. But almost no-one talks about what makes discussions successful. Let’s change that. Bio: Nathaniel J. Smith has been contributing to free and open source projects for a long time. He is very tired. **Maintaining the maintainers: work in the Carpentries supporting open source curriculum maintenance** by Tracy Teal Abstract: The Carpentries has 45 open-source, collaboratively-developed lessons on GitHub, each with its own set of maintainers. This talk will discuss the social and technological work we’re doing to create and support a community of maintainers and help make the work of maintenance valued, effective and enjoyable. Bio: Dr. Tracy Teal is a co-founder of Data Carpentry and the Executive Director of The Carpentries. **Requests: 1.6 million downloads a day; lessons learned** by Kenneth Reitz Abstract: I’ve learned a lot from creating / maintaining Python’s most heavily-utilized library. I’m here to share some insight into what works, and what doesn’t work, when it comes to project sustainability. Bio: Coming soon! ### _Technically-Focused Talks_ **CI Improvements to make Dependency Management a Dream!** by Cooper Lees Abstract: Do you have dependencies that get upgraded and changed? Well duh! Do you sometimes let requirements.txt go stale as you don’t have time to test new versions? If so this talk will use bandersnatch to show how strong Integration Tests along with pyup.io allows seamless dependency upgrade testing. Bio: Production Engineer at Facebook, maintainer of bandersnatch with a Networking role focus, working on [5G Backhaul technology][2], being a Big Unittest + Integration testing advocate for the team. **Get your free time back (by automating maintenance)** by Zac Hatfield-Dodds Abstract: Reporting a bug that’s fixed on master - but not on PyPI - is always frustrating. What if every pull request was automatically deployed as a new version? Hypothesis does just that, averaging around a release a day, and we’ve automated the tedious parts of code review too! Bio: By day, Zac is a researcher at the Australian National University's @3Ainstitute; by night a maintainer of Hypothesis (and other things). He likes code that actually works, books of all kinds, and getting offline in the Australian bush. **Taming the wild west of Python packaging** by John Reese Abstract: Sharing your Python package with the world is easy! Just copy-paste your setup.py from somewhere else, update a few fields, and upload, right? Unfortunately, choosing the correct metadata isn’t as simple. But with a few simple tips, you can graduate from packaging cowboy to packaging pro. Bio: John is a Production Engineer at Facebook, working on their Python Foundation team, building internal infrastructure and packaging tools for third party libraries. The Organizers -------------------- The Maintainers Summit is co-organized by Jackie Kazil and Shauna Gordon-McKeon, with assistance from Mel Chua. Please contact jackiekazil@gmail.com with questions. Resources -------------------- Once the summit is over, we'll post slides & videos on this page. In the meantime, check out [Awesome Maintainers][3], an index of "talks, blog posts, and interviews about the experience of being an open source maintainer" curated by [Nadia Eghbal][4]. [1]: https://us.pycon.org/2019/hatchery/ [2]: https://terragraph.com/ [3]: https://github.com/nayafia/awesome-maintainers [4]: https://github.com/nayafia