I had a great conversation with Jerod Santo on the Changelog podcast: The Changelog 351: Maintainer spotlight! Ned Batchelder. We talked about Open edX, and coverage.py, and maintaining open source software.

One of Jerod’s questions was unexpected: what other open source maintainers do I appreciate? Two people that came to mind were Daniel Hahler and Julian Berman. Some people are well-known in the Python community because they are the face of large widely used projects. Daniel and Julian are known to me for a different reason: they seem to make small contributions to many projects. I see their names in the commits or issues of many repos I wander through, including my own.

This is a different kind of maintainership: not guiding large efforts, but providing little pushes in lots of places. If I had had the presence of mind, I would have also mentioned Anthony Sottile for the same reason.

And I would have mentioned Mariatta, for a different reason: her efforts are focused on CPython, but on the contribution process and tooling around it, rather than the core code itself. A point I made in the podcast was that people and process challenges are often the limiting factor to contribution, not technical challenges. Mariatta has been at the forefront of the efforts to open up CPython contribution, and I wish I had mentioned her in the podcast.

And I am sure there are people I am overlooking that should be mentioned in these appreciations. My apologies to you if you are in that category...