How things sneak up on you

It's funny sometimes how things sneak up on you.

For those who don't know (or just forgot), I've been on the Board of Directors of the Python Software Foundation for five of the last six years. Four of those years I was Vice-Chair, and the last year I've been Chair. I'm also a CPython Core Developer, I serve on the Python Steering Council, I'm an active PyCon US volunteer, and last year I spent six months as the PSF's Interim General Manager. I'm deeply involved with many parts of the PSF. And yet, sometimes, things just sneak up on you.

As I'm writing this, the main part of PyCon US 2023 has just wrapped up. (Sprints start tomorrow, and I'll be there for them as well.) A few hours ago, the PSF's Executive Director, Deb Nicholson, gave a PSF Update in which she recapped some of the changes the PSF has seen over the last year, her first full year as Executive Director, and what we can expect in the immediate future. Specifically:

• We're hiring a Security Developer-in-Residence, courtesy of OpenSSF's Alpha-Omega.
• We have funding to keep the Developer-in-Residence (Łukasz) for another year, courtesy of Meta.
• We have funding to hire a second (or 'Deputy') Developer-in-Residence, courtesy of Bloomberg.
• We're hiring a PyPI Safety & Security Engineer, courtesy of AWS.
• We've hired a new Community Events Manager, Sarah Swienckowski-Eckhart.
• We've rolled out the first major, paid feature to PyPI  (paid for companies; open-source projects will always get the features for free).

In addition to all that, the PSF has plans to hire for a few staff roles and contract roles to support all the work that's being done, and to do more communication with and for the community. As Deb said in her update, we want to talk about how awesome the Python community is to anyone who will listen.

I have known about all of these things for months. Some of them have been public for months, even. And yet, it wasn't until Deb laid it all out earlier today that it hit me.

This is huge.

This. Is. Huge.

This is what we've been working towards for years. For more than a decade.

(What snuck up to me at that point was tears. That's what overwhelming emotion will do to me. I'm in tears while writing this.)

And when I say "we", I don't just mean Deb and the current PSF staff and Board. I mean all of the past Board members and PSF staff as well, and especially Ewa Jodlowska and Van Lindberg. I don't want to downplay how much work Deb or anyone else has done over the last year, but the groundwork for all of it was started more than a decade ago by Ewa and Van. Without their efforts to build the PSF into a stable, solid, reliable foundation (in both the literal and figurative sense), we would not be in a position to accept the funds to hire for these roles. If it wasn't for Ewa showing how we could hire Łukasz and put him to good use, I doubt any of these companies would trust us with the funds to do any of this -- and they would be right not to trust us.

Neither Van nor Ewa could make it to PyCon US this year, and they were sorely missed. (Van stepped down from the PSF board a little while back, and Ewa left for her own exciting opportunities back in 2021.) But what really snuck up on me is how much we continue to owe them, and how much of an example they set for the rest of us to try and follow.

And we'll keep trying!