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.
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