I’m trying to post these roughly once a month. Here’s the January post.

I am working on open source projects, as part of an internship at FOSSEE and as a part of grant-funded work on pip’s dependency resolver.

Work I did (Jan 6 - Feb 5)

Technical

  • Co-worked with another developer, in person, for 1 week, on pip!
  • Triaged pip’s issue tracker (a lot).
  • Spend some time improving pip’s test suite infrastructure.
  • Investigated Python 2 usage, to identify anomalies.
  • Helped with virtualenv 20.0 release (kinda!).
  • Invested effort to improve pip’s test suite
  • Helped aggregate test cases for pip’s next generation resolver.

Communication

  • Managed the pip 20.0 release fiasco.
  • Helped the UX folks get started with working on pip.

Additional notes on challenges

January has been a very productive month.

Most of the challenges have been the logistics around work, not the work as such.

My health has been pretty good and there’s a certain flow to my work that I’m enjoying now. Turns out, if you like what you’re doing, you tend to be pretty productive! :)

As long as I remember to push my blog posts to the repository, they’ll actually go live on the day they’re supposed to.

Goals for February 2020

Technical

  • Internal Cleansing: AKA Technical debt down payment.
  • Issue triage: Triage a fair number of issues on pip’s issue tracker.
  • Technical Documentation: improving pip’s technical documentation, for contributors and developers

Communication

  • Help all the other contractors to get up to “full speed” for working on pip
  • Get PyPA to participate in GSoC 2020
  • Python Packaging Summit at PyCon US 2020: help organization.
  • Move forward on Python Packaging Governance

Other commitments

None.

Help us

How can you help us?

  • provide test cases where the latest released version of pip (19.3.1, at the time of writing) fails to resolve dependencies properly (on zazo’s issue tracker). They will help us design and test the new resolver.
  • talk with your company about becoming a PSF sponsor. The Fundable Packaging Improvements page lists fairly well-scoped projects that would happen much faster if we get funding to achieve them.
  • Have an interview with our UX expert, who is working to improve usability of Python Packaging tooling.