There was a bit of a kerfuffle about subverting open source projects recently. That incident made me think about something that's generally on my mind. That thought again was triggered by that incident but is otherwise not in response to it. I want to talk about some of the stresses of being an Open Source contributor and maintainer but specifically about something that have been unsure over the years about: anonymity and pseudonymity. Over the years it has been pretty clear that some folks are contributing in the Open Source space and don't want to have their name attached to their contributi ..read more

You're probably familiar with tech debt. There is a joke that if there is tech debt, surely there must be derivatives to work with that debt? I'm happy to say that the Rust ecosystem has created an environment where it looks like one solution for tech debt is collateralization. Here is how this miracle works. Say you have a library stuff which depends on some other library learned-rust-this-way. The author of learned-rust-this-way at one point lost interest in this thing and issues keep piling up. Some of those issues are feature requests, others are legitimate bugs. However you as the person ..read more

This will be a slightly different post. It has to do with the country I am living in with my family: Austria. More importantly it has to do with some some observations and of mine about how this country functions. There is a rather famous quote about Vienna: “If the world once ends, I'll move to Vienna, because that's where everything happens fifty years later”. It has been attributed to Gustav Mahler who lived at the tail end of the 19th century. It might also have been said by anyone else or about a different city. Yet as a description of Vienna is highly accurate — even today — and it in ma ..read more

Two weeks ago I asked the question again about What Rye should be. There has been one thing that I have not publicly shared before and that is that ever since Rye exists I have also been talking to Charlie Marsh about Python packaging and Python tooling. It turns out that we had some shared ideas of what an ideal Python tooling landscape would look like. That has lead to some very interesting back and forths. To make a potentially very long story short: Together with Astral's release of uv they will take stewardship of Rye. For the details read on. For me Rye is an exciting test bed of what Py ..read more

In April of last year I released Rye to the public. Rye, both then and now, represents my very personal vision of what an improved Python packaging and project management solution can look like. Essentially, it's a comprehensive user experience, designed so that the only tool a Python programmer would need to interface with is Rye itself and it gets you from zero to one in a minute. It is capable of bootstrapping Python by automatically downloading different Python versions, it creates virtualenvs, it manages dependencies, and lints and formats. Initially developed for my own use, I decided to ..read more

You likely know that I've contributed significantly to the Open Source community, that I work for an Open Source Company, that we got shit for calling ourselves Open Source and that we subsequently created a new license to address at least some of these concerns. I also shared my personal thoughts on that license recently which unfortunately promptly attracted a bunch more negative comments for that. That introduction might make me sound a tad bitter, so let's talk about something else. This Christmas I received a 3D printer and I love it for two reasons. Firstly, it was an unexpected gift fro ..read more

A lot has been said about Python typing. If you have been following me on Twitter (or you have the dubious pleasure of working with me), you probably know my skepticism towards Python typing. This stems from the syntax's complexity, the sluggishness of mypy, the overall cumbersome nature of its implementation and awkwardness of interactions with it. I won't dwell on these details today, instead I want to take you on a little journey back to my early experiences with Python. Why? Because I believe the conflict between the intrinsic philosophy of Python and the concept of typing is fundamental a ..read more

Sentry relicensed under a new license, called the Functional Source License (FSL). Like the BUSL it replaces, It's not an Open Source license by the OSI definition, but it comes with an irrevocable grant: after two years it turns into an Apache 2.0 licensed artifact (or MIT for the alternative form). It's the response to a lot of feedback we have received about our previous use of the BUSL. You can read all about the switch to FSL in the Announcement Blog Post. (You can also find my original thoughts on the use of the BUSL here.) I believe this license to be closer to Open Source than what we ..read more

This year I decided that I want to share my most important learnings about engineering, teams and quite frankly personal mental health. My hope is that those who want to learn from me find it useful. You can't make it 15 minutes on Twitter or elsewhere, without running into a post about a botched return to work implementation. You also can't make it for very long to hear about the San Francisco doom loop. These two topics relate in a quite deep way to me personally. This post is a reflection of working at Sentry for almost 10 years, a company primarily headquartered in San Francisco and how it ..read more

I very rarely write recaps of conferences but this time around I could not resist. This is for a lot of reasons. To kick things off, quite a bit of what was on my mind relates quite directly to a perception of a general negativity in the Rust community that I share. Most specifically this quote by Adam Chalmer: Rustconf definitely felt sadder and downbeat than my previous visit. […] I felt like this year's conference was defensive and maybe somewhat depressed. I wanted to give the spirit of Rust a hug and tell it, "hey, I know you've had a tough year". Not only did this get me thinking, I also ..read more