PyCon 2017 in Review¶

Things are finally getting back to normal for us after another very busy PyCon. It’s always wonderful seeing old friends and getting a chance to meet new friends from the community. PyCon provides a great outlet to talk to others in our community about the problems we all face as open source developers and open source companies – like funding, sustainability, and building community. We are sad to see PyCon leave Portland, but luckily PyCascades will soon be filling the void left in Cascadia after PyCon moves on.

This year, we announced official sprints on Read the Docs during the sprint week following PyCon. We focused our sprint efforts on code cleanup, in order to avoid the problems on-boarding new contributors we normally face as a large project.

The sprints went surprisingly well this year. We were able to enlist the help of several new contributors during sprints, and folks didn’t waste any time diving into the code. It was a large relief to finally spend some time addressing code cleanup and removal. Contributors were able to create and merge 38 pull requests over the week, and we’re still wrapping up work on several other pull requests. Our work focused on several areas in particular:

Linting strictness

When we started a serious effort to lint our codebase, we decided to address linting incrementally. We currently do a primary pass with low strictness, and a second pass of higher strictness only on select paths. During the sprints, contributors were able to pick off and focus on a single Django application. Cumulatively, contributors were able to fix linting issues across all of our applications and we’re very close to again raising our strictness application-wide.

Code removal

Several contributors moved on to hunting down and removing some unused code and dependencies. Having started with linting and testing problems, these contributors seemed well primed to understanding more complex parts of our code. We were able to remove several unused legacy pieces of code and some unused dependencies as a result.

Python 3

Contributor gthank started porting Read the Docs to Python 3 before the sprints, and was able to drop by our sprint to debug some problems with porting. We’ve been wanting to port to Python 3 for years now, but unfortunately, we could never justify this work as the core team. This pull request is still a work in progress, but we anxiously await being able to make the switch to Python 3.

As the Read the Docs core team is small, we can’t easily justify using our time to focus on long standing issues with code quality, so the PyCon sprints were a perfect opportunity to focus on this type of clean up. Our codebase is complex and unwieldy to new contributors, so focusing on linting and testing allowed contributors to jump in without having to spend the better part of a day setting up our full stack.

We were very gracious to have all of this help. A big thanks once again to all of our new contributors who stuck around and contributed:

• cmc333333
• lordmauve
• fmoor
• smcoll
• gthank

PyCon has now wrapped up, but our next stop this summer is DjangoCon 2017 in Spokane, WA. We look forward to seeing some more of you there and hopefully working with some of you to sprint on Read the Docs again!