BBC’s micro:bit project open-sourced today!

As you may recall, there have been a couple of previous posts to this blog about the BBC’s micro:bit project  (also see PSF newsblog).

The micro:bit is a small, stripped-down, wearable computer (similar to a Raspberry Pi) and based on an nRF51 chip. The educational project, part of a larger UK program called Make it Digital, is designed to inspire children to become digital creators by giving away 1 million micro:bits to all 11 year-old UK schoolchildren this spring.

Today I heard some exciting news about the project from our good friend, Nicholas Tollervey, which I’m happy to pass along here. 

According to Nicholas: 

From the beginning the BBC have said that Python would be one of the possible languages that the device can be programmed in. The PSF is one of around twenty organisations in the project partnership. Since it’s a microcontroller, and the aim is to run Python… well, there’s a pretty obvious answer when trying to combine those two things. 

We’re incredibly pleased to announce that MicroPython runs on the BBC’s micro:bit. Furthermore, all the work done so far is being open-sourced today and the repository can be found here: https://github.com/bbcmicrobit/micropython

Right now only the code related to the MicroPython port is released. When the device is delivered, all the resources needed to recreate the entire project are to be released under an open license. The laudable intention is to provide an unencumbered legacy so others can build upon and adapt the work of the partnership that has created this device. 

To read more details and learn the story of how MicroPython came to be on the micro:bit, check out Nicholas Tollervey’s blog post found here: http://ntoll.org/article/story-micropython-on-microbit

Finally, there is much to be done. The project needs help from people with skill and experience developing for such devices. Could you contribute something to a project that will touch the lives of 1 million children and leave an open legacy that anyone could re-use? If so then please read the above-linked post and head on over to the code repository.

I hope that many of you will take Nicholas up on his request to contribute to this worthwhile project.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

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Read the Docs: growing with a little help from its friends at the PSF (and elsewhere)

Today's post, like the previous one, features a development project that the PSF has been delighted to fund once again this year.

On April 28, 2015, the PSF Board unanimously approved the following resolution:

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation grant  $8,000 to Read the Docs, Inc. for developmental work.

What is RTD?

Looking for somewhere to host your open source project’s documentation in a way that will make it readily available, easy to find, fully searchable for your users, and exportable in PDF format, while at the same time offering you ease of use and the ability to add content as your project develops? Then, you’ll want to check out Read the Docs, the world’s largest documentation website for open source projects. 

Read the Docs

… hosts documentation, making it fully searchable and easy to find. You can import your docs using any major version control system, including Mercurial, Git, Subversion, and Bazaar. We support webhooks so your docs get built when you commit code. There’s also support for versioning so you can build docs from tags and branches of your code in your repository.

RTD’s History

RTD was created in 2010 by Eric Holscher, Charles Leifer, and Bobby Grace for the 2010 Django Dash. Eric tells the interesting story at Djangocon. A Django Dash is a coding contest that allows 48 hours for development and implementation of a project. Eric and his team considered what to do and decided that, since current documentation hosting was less than satisfactory, they could be of most help to the community by creating a web-based doc hosting solution. They agreed that Sphinx was the best document tool for Python, so they went with that.

According to Eric, 2011 was the year that saw RTD go … from a hobby project, into something projects depended on. At that point, they were hosting documentation for Celery, Fabric, Nose, py.test, Virtualenv, Pip, Django CMS, Django, Grapelli/Floppyforms/Sentry, mod_wsgi. Currently, they are hosting what Eric describes as a decent part of the Python ecosystem, including SQL Academy, Pyramid, Requests, Minecraft Overviewer, and many others. They have over 50 contributors, 7500 users, and get over 15,000,000 pageviews a month. The code for RTD is on GitHub and its documentation can be found on the site. Rackspace provides free hosting. A full list of features is available on the site.

Photo Credit: Aaron Hockley, October 2014 

Creative Commons license 2.00

Use of PSF Grant

The PSF award was part of a fundraising drive that opened at PyCon 2015 and brought in $24,000 USD from 157 contributions since then (see the RTD Blog). Corporate sponsors included Twilio, Sentry, DreamHost, and Lincoln Loop; with service sponsorships from Elastic Search, MaxCDN, and Gandi.

This funding will support RTD for 3 months of development work on the path toward sustainability as an open source project. More specifically, the funds will allow RTD to hire 2 part-time paid positions: Community Developer and Operations Developer (see RTD Blogpost for details and how to apply).

Furthermore, RTD intends to document its use of PSF grant money;  how development time is spent and how funds are allocated will be posted on RTD’s public Trello board.

If you’d like to help, you can contribute to RTD at Gratipay and you can follow them on Twitter.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

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PSF funds development: Armin Rigo's CFFI 1.0

In looking back over the PSF newsblog posts, it appears that most of the PSF funded projects I’ve written about were conferences, workshops, and education/outreach efforts. These are, of course, truly important. However, it’s also important to get the word out about several development projects that the PSF has sponsored in 2015. One such project is Armin Rigo’s work on CFFI 1.0. 

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation grant Armin Rigo $2500 towards cffi development aimed at making cffi generated extension modules importable without runtime dependencies on an extension module build toolchain.

CFFI or C Foreign Function Interface for Python provides a way to call compiled C code, i.e., external C libraries, from Python using interface declarations written in C. This eliminates the need to use a programming language other than C and Python. At the same time, CFFI minimizes the amount of C code that needs to be written, so it really is a boon for Python developers. It works with Python 2.6 and up and with PyPy 2x and 3x. See CFFI Documentation.

CFFI has already had approximately 7 million downloads, so it is clearly of use, but its creator, Armin Rigo (who is also one of the creators of PyPy) saw room for improvement. Specifically, according to Armin, there were two main problems:

1. 
   The difficulties of installation [which] can be seen from outside by looking at various workarounds and 3rd-party documentation that have grown into existence. For example, the setup.py of projects like cryptography, PyNaCl and bcrypt deploys workarounds that are explicitly documented inhttps://caremad.io/2014/11/distributing-a-cffi-project/.
   
   


2. 
   The time taken at import is excessive in some cases. For example, importing pygame-cffi on a Raspberry Pi ARM board takes on the order of 10 to 20 seconds (and this is the fast case where the compiler doesn’t need to be invoked any more)
   
   

Due to the PSF grant, Armin was able to fix both problems. The 1.0 version, now in beta, is available at CFFI 1.0.

Our thanks to the amazing Armin Rigo for this very welcome tool!

Stay tuned for my next post about the PSF’s recent award of $8,000 USD for Read the Docs. 

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

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PSF Python Job Board relaunched !

Announcing: the brand new PSF Python Job Board

We are happy to announce that we have successfully relaunched the PSF Python Job Board.



After almost one year of development and lots of work by our volunteers and contractors, we are now live with the new Python job board system.

New modern system

The new system is fully integrated into the python.org website. Job submitters can create an account on the system, log in and directly submit their job posting for approval by the PSF Job Board Team.



The team can then review the postings, check them against our submission criteria, possibly fixing some formatting, and then approve or reject the postings directly through a web interface.



No more sending dozens of emails back and forth to get the job template fixed and adding jobs to the website by hand.

Thank you to our volunteers

The new system was a major effort for all of us and I'd like to say thank you from the PSF to everyone who helped make this happen (in alphabetical order):

Reviewers:

• Simon Hayward


• Melanie Jutras


• Marc-Andre Lemburg


• Giles Thomas

Developers:

• Wiktor Bachnik


• James Bennett


• Jacob Burch


• Jon Clements


• Gil Gonçalves


• Simon Hayward


• Sarah Kuchinsky


• Marc-Andre Lemburg


• Berker Peksag


• Benjamin Peterson


• Frank Wiles

Plus everyone I forgot in this list (sorry; mail me and I'll have you added).



We'd also like to thank to Martin Thomas and Chris Withers, who each ran the Python Job Board for several years by email before the job board team was set up.

Job submitters

If you want to submit a job, please visit the how-to page which describes the process.



Submissions are free, but we'd appreciate a thank you in form of a donation to the PSF.

Job seekers

You can click through the jobs on the jobs listing or subscribe to the RSS feed we have for the listings.

Please note that we do not post CVs on the site. You will have to contact the companies directly.



Good luck with finding a new job !

Brand new bugs for free

As with every new system, there are still some bugs left. If you find something, please report it on the Github issue tracker.

More information

More information on the PSF Python Job Board and the relaunch project is available on our project page:

• PSF Python Job Board

If you have questions, please write to jobs@python.org.



Enjoy,

--

Marc-Andre Lemburg

Director, Python Software Foundation

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