Python Core Developer Sprint 2024

The idea: bring a bunch of Python core team members, triagers, and special guests to the same room for a week. It's hugely beneficial and productive, we held many in-depth discussions that just don't happen when we're all remote and async, and got to work on many different things together.

The sprint room

During the week, I reviewed 39 pull requests, created 15, merged 10, updated 4, and closed 2 issues.

Monday highlights

As release manager for Python 3.14, I discussed with Brett Cannon one of his project ideas which will come after lock files, and after the next big one.

Also as RM, discussed with Russell Keith-Magee, Ned Deily, Łukasz Langa and Thomas Wouters about including official binaries for iOS and Android, which wandered into ideas about security releases.

I did some maintenance of our PyPI projects, adding PEP 740 attestations, support for the new Python 3.13 and dropping support for the very-nearly-EOL 3.8.

Tuesday highlights

Started investigating slow doctest on 3.13+ with Alex Waygood, who on Wednesday narrowed it down to a problem with the new incremental garbage collector, which would go on to be reverted by Friday and result in Python 3.13's Monday release to be postponed and replaced with an extra release candidate. Not ideal, but much better to discover these things before the big release.

We had a Q&A session with the Steering Council: Barry Warsaw, Emily Morehouse, Gregory P. Smith, Pablo Galindo Salgado and Thomas.

The Python Steering Council

Proofread Guido van Rossum's STAR voting proposal for electing future steering councils.

Discussed with Eric Snow his novel method for displaying many code samples in a table, using <details> disclosures to prevent the table being too wide. Looks like a good solution!

Wednesday highlights

I applied the finishing touches to PEP 2026 (Calendar versioning for Python) and Barry gave it a final review. Ready for submission!

Seth Larson, the PSF Security Developer-in-Residence, wasn't at the sprint but we discussed our plan to stop providing GPG signatures for CPython and rely on SigStore instead. This is now PEP 761!

Also not at the sprint, I recommended PSF Infrastructure Engineer Jacob Coffee as a CPython triager. Welcome aboard!

The whole room discussed including static type annotations in CPython.

We had a Q&A session with two of the three Developers-in-Residence, Łukasz and Petr Viktorin.

Q&A with Łukasz and Petr

Discussed expanding the voter pool for Steering Council elections with Mariatta, Greg and Thomas.

Larry Hastings handed out, in return for oohs and aahs, some nice P.C.D.S. 2024 stickers he generously designed and printed up for us. Thanks!

PCDS 2024 stickers by Larry

Thursday highlights

On the 26th September, at 10:26 Bellevue time (20:26 Helsinki time), I submitted PEP 2026 to the Steering Council!🤞

Brett discussed whether we should update PEP 387 to prefer 5 year deprecations instead of 2 years.

Brandt Bucher gave us all an update on the progress of the Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler ("we went from 0% slower to 0% faster!") and we discussed plans for Python 3.14.

Because I couldn't attend Thursday's Helsinki Python meetup due to being at another kind of Python meetup on the other side of the world, I gave the famous HelPy quiz to the assembled core devs. Unsurprisingly they did pretty well, but the most incorrect answer was a pleasant surprise: we've had ~400 not ~80 new contributors to Python 3.13!

Pablo performed card tricks!

Magic from Pablo

Meta took us out for a delicious dinner at a local fish restaurant. Thank you!

Friday highlights

Mariatta presented ideas to Jelle Zijlstra, Petr, Russell and me about to use modern tools to create a modern, interactive tutorial.

Also during the week, continued work with Adam Turner on improving the docs.python.org build. Adam wasn't at the sprint, so tag-teamed PR reviews overnight. After much work straddling many teams, projects and repos, we've got the full HTML build loop for 13 languages × 3 versions down from over 40 hours to just under 9 hours, with more improvements coming.

Made a demo of the CPython docs using the PyData Sphinx Theme.

Along with around 25 others, I was on Łukasz and Pablo's core.py podcast.

Łukasz and Pablo in their ad-hoc podcast studio in a Meta meeting room

Itamar gave us cake for the podcast's first birthday!

cake.py. Photo by Itamar Oren.

Thank you

It was a hugely productive week, big thanks to Itamar Oren and Meta for organising and hosting, and to Dead Set Bit for the time off to attend!

See also Mariatta's excellent blog posts, and I recommend the core.py podcast with short interviews with some 25 attendees! Łukasz and Pablo were also guests on the Changelog podcast during the sprint.

Header photo by Itamar Oren.