Tag Archives: Twisted

The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Volume II

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I was honored to be approached last year by editors Amy Brown and Greg Wilson to write a chapter on Twisted for The Architecture of Open Source Applications Volume II: Structure, Scale, and a Few More Fearless Hacks. This was my first-ever contribution to a book, and a great introduction to the writing, review, and editing cycles for a technical book.

The book was released as a paperback on May 8th and is now available in a number of formats. Other chapters include: Firefox release engineering, GDB, Git, Matplotlib, Mediawiki, Puppet, and PyPy.

As with Volume I, the material is under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, and all royalties are donated to Amnesty International.

Twisted logo

Ways to enjoy the book:

Thank you Glyph and JP for letting me pick their brains for hours while researching my chapter, and to Glyph and Adam for their reviews of the numerous drafts.

PyCon 2012 poster: getting and retaining new contributors to open source projects

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My poster at the PyCon 2012 poster session was on getting and retaining contributors to open source projects.

A short video of me summarizing the poster is at http://pyvideo.org/video/692/2-twisted-matrix-high-scores.

The full-sized 4′x6′ poster pdf is here.

The poster strives to start a dialog in 3 areas of open source community management:

  1. Providing a welcoming environment with clear contribution guidelines and opportunities for new contributors.
  2. Identifying where in the ticket lifecycle a project bottlenecks and loses potential contributors, and how to incentivize community members to work on those bottlenecks.
  3. Resources for beginning open source contributors.

I use the Twisted Matrix High scores list as an example of one strategy to incentivize community members to work on ticket bottlenecks.

I happily got a lot of traffic in the poster hall, with a lot of people sharing their community stories and checking out OpenHatch and Twisted as a result (one Twisted sprinter even said he came to our sprint because of the poster!)

I was was right next to Brian Curtin, who had posters on the PSF Sprints and Outreach and Education committees. He funneled people to me to talk about the Boston Python Workshop grant.

For more on the poster session, see the call for posters, list of posters, and the full PyCon 2012 video list.