Comment by gpshead
1 year ago
Adding to the wonderful writeup by my now-ex teammate (thanks!):
Several of us were/are/TBD also involved in both long term strategic leadership and maintenance of the open source CPython project itself. That direct feedback line from a major diverse needs user into the project and ecosystem was valuable for the world.
The reason I stayed on this team for 12+ years is as zem said. It was an ideal impactful alignment of people, abilities, priorities, and work life balance. My prior teams at Google... were often not.
For the first half of our Python teams existence, there were only ~5 of us. Many early years were spent paying down internal tech debt accumulated from prior years of neglecting to have a strong Python strategy and letting too many do their own thing. Python was one of the very first languages used widely at Google. It was the last major backend language to get a language team.
Signed, -- the now-ex runtimes TL
yes, i definitely should have said more about the cpython leadership work! i was responding to a comment that had already mentioned upstream contributions so i didn't think to highlight it more, but it was a huge contribution to both google and to cpython at large.
well, why don't you guys stay together and continue work? start your own thing! google fired you, yes, but you're still alive and able to communicate. maybe you won't get paid as much as you did at google. but prove to them that you have something of value to provide to society.