As of December 19th, 2016 I have found a new role at Amazon Web Services, for more information, see the post “A New Home”.

For the past year and a half I’ve been employed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise to work full time on improving and maintaining the Python community’s packaging toolchain. This critical investment in the Python ecosystem has enabled me to push forward on efforts like Warehouse ¹, improving pip, new packaging standards, and taking time to help out individual people who are having problems with the current tooling. I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished in this time and that would not have been possible without HPE’s support.

I am incredibly grateful of the time that HPE has given me. Unfortunately all things must end and today I have been notified that, as part of a widespread layoff, my last day at HPE will be October 28th.

So I’m looking for a new position! If you’re a company looking for a developer here’s what you should know about me (besides what’s on my résumé) and what I seek in a job.

Me

I am obviously particularly interested in software distribution, and given my role with PyPI and pip I have a particularly unique experience in designing and operating an open source software distribution system at a fairly large scale ². However, outside of that I also have a interest in:

• Improving the security of computing and software.
• Designing APIs that are simple and easy to use.
• Developing tooling to help other developers be more effective.
• Paying down technical debt and “unsticking” stuck projects.
• Working with and contributing to Open Source communities and ecosystems.

My Open source

I maintain and operate a number of popular Open Source projects such as PyPI, Warehouse, pip, as well as a large number of less well known but critical projects and efforts in the Python community. These projects are relied upon by almost every Python developer and are critical to the functioning of the Python ecosystem.

Due in large part to the subsidization of my time by HPE I have been able to achieve (among many other things):

• Wrote a from-scratch rewrite of PyPI (currently available at https://pypi.org/ ) which focuses on maintainability and ease of contribution.
• Wrote a statistic processing pipeline that processes and stores 500+ million download events a month.
• Contributed to the maintenance of pip, including responding to pull requests acting as release manager, and acting as a point of contact for downstream redistributors.
• Removed insecure and unreliable external hosting completely from PyPI.
• Documented the “Simple” API for PyPI to allow interoperability for all PyPI consuming clients.
• Helped design a method that will be used as a stepping stone to allow making a setup.py file optional when distributing Python packages.
• Simplifying PyPI and consumers of PyPI by limiting the types of files and file extensions that can be used on PyPI.

I wish to continue this work, but doing so requires a nontrivial time commitment (for an idea, see my previous post Powering the Python Package Index) which is not realistically sustainable alongside a high-stress, 40 hour a week job. I seek companies which understand using volunteer software is a two-way street and value giving back to open source by subsidizing developer time.

This does not require a position where 100% of my time would be dedicated to working on my Open Source projects, but the ideal position would involve a reasonable amount of dedicated time as an investment back in the ecosystem and community they’re using. However, if you are willing to fully subsidize my time for PyPI, then all the better!

You

The following should describe you, the company:

• You must support remote work. I live in the exurbs of Philadelphia and have been working remote from home for almost my entire career.
  • If you don’t have a large (or any) remote work force today, but you’re willing to work with me to make it work that is OK as well.
• You should have a positive culture that doesn’t pit people against each other and rewards hard work.

Let’s Talk!

If nothing above sounds like a deal-breaker, please contact me, preferably via email at donald@stufft.io. Thanks!