Carl Trachte: Mining Engineer Turned Geek

Another #LABHR post.

I first met Carl when he came to a training session for new PyCon speakers. He was very nervous, and concerned that his topic would not be of sufficient interest to his audience. I made a point of attending the beginning of his talk, and by the time I left there was no doubt in my mind that Carl would do well in the Python community.

Over the years he has done invaluable work for the PSF, both in policing potential abuses of the Foundation's trademark for the Python programming language, and also in collecting sample descriptions of Python in many languages and alphabets to try and make Python's web presence more welcoming to those from diverse linguistic communities.

He has been a PyCon volunteer for a while now, helping others to find what they need and demonstrating by example the helping spirit of Python and open source generally.

Carl has done all this with no thought of return, and in doing them has helped uncountable numbers of Python users. Well done, Carl, and thanks!

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.