Building a Hat Rack

Leslie Hawthorn, Elastic Search’s enthusiastic communities manager, has been involved with open source for quite a while, and has come up with what seems to be a good idea. She's trying to get public acknowledgment for services to open source that often go unsung, and I recommend that you read her blog post and take action on it yourself under hashtag #LABHR (Let's all build a hat rack). I certainly shall be doing, and this is the first of my actions. I gather the intention is to show developers some love on Valentine's Day to start with, but it would be amazing if this could become a continuous process.

It was in the spirit of "building a hat rack" in the sense of making achievements visible that I first proposed the Python Software Foundation present Community Service Awards to deserving members of the community. The prize bestows a free place at PyCon to recipients, but mostly the certificate simply represents recognition that a group of your peers have recognized your efforts, which have typically been long-term and beneficial to a broad cross-section of many Python communities. Recipients are listed on the python.org web site.

More recently the Foundation introduced Distinguished Service awards, of which so far there have been two recipients.

If you have anything to do with Python at all, even if you are “merely” a Python user, the selfless actions of these people have impacted your life in a huge way over the last 25 years, and I hope you are grateful to them, as I am.

Small Python from Synapse is a Big Deal

The guys from Synapse didn't appear to be at PyCon this year, but they impressed me last year with their hacking of the "Easy Button" to tweet on Twitter when the button was pressed.

It seems they are still impressing people, as they have just been awarded a SmartGrid.TMCnet.com Product of the Year award. Congratulations to them - I am sure they will be a significant Python user in future.

Another Award for Python

With the month of May comes notification from Linux Journal that Python has won their 2009 Readers' Choice Award for Favorite Programming Language, narrowly beating C++ and Java. The favorite scripting language was bash.

Last year there were some fairly obscure rules about what constituted a programming language and a scripting language. This year the readers themselves decided, and Python also did quite well in the second category.

“In an industry conceived, created and driven by peers, an accolade from the community is the highest compliment you can get,” said Linux Journal publisher Carlie Fairchild. She's right, and it's nice to know that Python's mindshare continues to increase.