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I'm excited to join the Sovereign Tech Fellowship

python Sovereign-Tech-Fellowship
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For the duration of 2025, I’m thrilled to join the Sovereign Tech Fellowship for Maintainers!

This is a pilot programme from the Sovereign Tech Agency to pay maintainers of critical open source technologies in the public interest.

I’m one of six participants in this first cohort and I’ll be working on Python, with a focus on CPython, including as release manager for Python 3.14 (under development with full release due in October 2025, supported until 2030) and the next one (development starts in May 2025 for release in October 2026, supported until 2031).

I’m delighted to work with the Sovereign Tech Agency as they really get open source. Supported by Germany’s Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, they recognise the importance of open source and its place as critical digital infrastructure in the public interest. In their own words:

The Sovereign Tech Agency supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructure. Our goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source ecosystem. We focus on security, resilience, technological diversity, and the people behind the code.

We often don’t notice how much our lives depend on digital infrastructure until it stops working. But making it available, accessible and secure is key for digitalization in the public interest. The Sovereign Tech Agency invests in open digital infrastructure. It is critical for innovation and economic growth, and forms the foundation for digitalization across sectors.

In addition to CPython core development and release management, I’ll continue to maintain other Python projects such as Pillow, humanize and termcolor, and CLI utilities such as norwegianblue, pypistats and pepotron, and help out more widely in the Python ecosystem.

Tasks include:

  • Bug fixing, issue triaging, PR review and security improvements
  • Mentoring new contributors to foster community growth and diversity
  • Communicating updates to the wider community via blog posts and social media
  • Workflow, CI, and infrastructure optimisations to streamline core development tasks
  • Maintenance and improvement of PEP editing infrastructure and related documentation tools
  • Automation and dashboard creation for triage scripts to assist other contributors
  • Process and workflow improvements for CI and core contributor environments
  • Ongoing documentation enhancements, including hosting monthly Documentation Working Group meetings, improving build processes, and focusing on accessibility
  • Updating and modernising projects for compatibility with the latest Python versions
  • Implementing stronger security measures and using Trusted Publishing and digital attestations
  • Adding and maintaining Python support for widely used PyPI packages
  • Improving community-wide tooling, documentation, and accessibility

Meet my fellow Sovereign Tech Fellows, and by the way, the Sovereign Tech Agency is currently hiring, check out their open positions.