Mailman 3 ANN: NumPy Fellowship Program & Sayed Adel as our first Developer in Residence - NumPy-Discussion

1 Dec 2022

      Hi all,

I'm excited to be able to share this announcement on behalf of the NumPy
Steering Council. We have created a new program, the NumPy Fellowship
Program, and offered Sayed Adel the very first Developer in Residence role.
Sayed starts his 1 year tenure in that role today, and we are really
looking forward to him working on NumPy full-time.

We wrote a blog post about the program, and why we offered the role to
Sayed: https://blog.scientific-python.org/numpy/fellowship-program/. I've
copied the blog post content at the end of this email.

In addition, here is some more detail on NumPy project finances that didn't
make it into the blog post (which is likely to have a wider audience than
the readership of this mailing list), but is quite relevant to share here:

Over the past decade, NumPy has accumulated individual donations as well as
payments from Tidelift. NumPy has been a fiscally sponsored project of
NumFOCUS for a decade - meaning that NumFOCUS, as a 501(c)3 nonprofit,
administers funds for NumPy. As a result, NumPy has accumulated funds for a
long time - and those are now transparently administered on Open Collective
https://opencollective.com/numpy. There you will see a "general fund",
currently with a ~$23,000 balance, and two open "projects" with committed
funding - one for the active CZI grant we have, and one for this new
Fellowship Program. Guidelines for using those funds are described in
https://numpy.org/neps/nep-0048-spending-project-funds.html.

Finally it is worth pointing out that we are now able to solicit donations
on Open Collective, and have added contribution tiers on the front page of
https://opencollective.com/numpy. Until now, we have never actively
solicited donations as a project, because the accounting support and
transparent financial reporting was not in place. That has changed now
though, so we are hoping that with guidelines to spend funds plus a
concrete fellowship program that we're expecting to be quite impactful, we
are now able to confidently tell people that if they donate to NumPy, we
will manage their contribution well and translate it into more time for
someone on the NumPy team to make NumPy better.

Cheers,
Ralf

blog post content:

The NumPy team is excited to announce the launch of the NumPy Fellowship
Program and the appointment of Sayed Adel (@seiko2plus) as the first NumPy
Developer in Residence. This is a significant milestone in the history of
the project: for the first time, NumPy is in a position to use its project
funds to pay for a full year of maintainer time. We believe that this will
be an impactful program that will contribute to NumPy’s long-term
sustainability as a community-driven open source project.

Sayed has been making major contributions to NumPy since the start of 2020,
in particular around computational performance. He is the main author of
the NumPy SIMD architecture (NEP 38, docs), generously shared his knowledge
of SIMD instructions with the core developer team, and helped integrate the
work of various volunteer and industry contributors in this area. As a
result, we’ve been able to expand support to multiple CPU architectures,
integrating contributions from IBM, Intel, Apple, and others, none of which
would have been possible without Sayed. Furthermore, when NumPy tentatively
started using C++ in 2021, Sayed was one of the proponents of the move and
helped with its implementation.

The NumPy Steering Council sees Sayed’s appointment to this role as both
recognition of his past outstanding contributions as well as an opportunity
to continue improving NumPy’s computational performance. In the next 12
months, we’d like to see Sayed focus on the following:

    SIMD code maintenance,
    code review of SIMD contributions from others,
    performance-related features,
    sharing SIMD and C++ expertise with the team and growing a NumPy
sub-team around it,
    SIMD build system migration to Meson,
    and wherever else Sayed’s interests take him.

    “I’m both happy and nervous: this is a great opportunity, but also a
great responsibility,” said Sayed in response to his appointment.

The funds for the NumPy Fellowship Program come from a partnership with
Tidelift and from individual donations. We sincerely thank both Tidelift
and everyone who donated to the project—without you, this program would not
be possible! We also acknowledge the CPython Developer-in-Residence and the
Django Fellowship programs, which served as inspiration for this program.

Sayed officially starts as the NumPy Developer in Residence today, 1
December 2022. Already, we are thinking about opportunities beyond this
first year: we imagine “in residence” roles that focus on developing,
improving, and maintaining other parts of the NumPy project (e.g.,
documentation, website, translations, contributor experience, etc.). We
look forward to this exciting new chapter of the NumPy contributor
community and will keep you posted on our progress.

ANN: NumPy Fellowship Program & Sayed Adel as our first Developer in Residence

Ralf Gommers

Stefan van der Walt

Stefan van der Walt

Brigitta Sipőcz

Sayed Adel

Sebastian Berg

Julien Jerphanion

Ross Barnowski

腾刘

Ganesh Kathiresan

Evgeni Burovski

matti.picus＠gmail.com

Charles R Harris

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