This page details my more popular/important open source projects; for a full listing of everything, see my Github profile.

To see my current overall roadmap, head to the bottom of the page.

Giving back

If you’re a user of my open source and want to give back, I accept payments/donations/bounties/bribes/etc at the following spots:

  • Tidelift, if your company wants to explore subscribing to aid developers of their open source dependencies - most of my projects are on here.
  • Github Sponsors - for now, just enabled arbitrary monthly or one-time amounts, no specific tiers or anything.
  • Square Cash / cash.me if you prefer that.
  • PayPal.me likewise.
  • Steam wishlist - sadly our brains don’t work great if we’re coding truly nonstop!
  • Amazon wishlist ditto (it’s mostly books).

The major projects

Fabric

Fabric is a high level Python task runner & SSH toolkit. It’s the first major OSS project I undertook, adapting the original author’s one-module Capistrano clone into a larger, more Unix-y package.

Ownership transferred to me in 2008 and Fabric’s codebase & popularity as a task runner & deploy tool have grown in leaps & bounds since then. It’s easily the most popular option for Python web developers & is also used by a number of system administrators and operations toolkits.

While Fabric sees most of its use in private codebases (being an end-user tool), there are a number of projects on Github and PyPI which depend on it, such as TimelineJS, Flocker, NPR’s app template, Cuisine, Littlechef, w3af, and more.

Paramiko

The lower-level SSH functionality that Fabric uses is contained in Paramiko, created by Robey Pointer in 2003; it’s arguably been the default choice for SSH-via-Python since that time.

My stewardship of Fabric meant I worked closely with Paramiko for quite a while, and in 2012 I was given full ownership of the project.

Paramiko is depended upon by countless projects and services, including Ansible, Boto, OpenStack, StackStorm, Open edX, Review Board, DataDog, NSQ, Bees With Machine Guns, and many more.

Invoke

Around 2011 it became clear Fabric needed rearchitecting, and as part of that process I created Invoke. Invoke is a ground-up, test-driven, Python 2+3 compatible rewrite of all functionality within Fabric that isn’t SSH specific: task management, local command execution, and so forth.

It’s gathered a number of users, contributors and downstream projects, independently of those relying on it for Fabric 2: PyCA Cryptography, Komodo Edit, TextBlob, Mopidy, Marshmallow, etc.

Alabaster

Born out of my thoughts surrounding proper project website management, the Alabaster Sphinx theme is a lightweight theme (based on popular existing Python doc sites) with a strong emphasis on customizability via configuration options.

I’m pretty sure I am the only one using it in dual-site setups, but it’s drawn a number of users regardless, and it now ships with Sphinx (as of 1.3) as the default theme.

Releases

Along with Alabaster, Releases is one of my “meta-projects” that arose simply from having multiple other projects to wrangle. This one is a changelog plugin for Sphinx that lets you write multi-release-branch changelogs as a ‘stream’ of changes, and collates those into release buckets.

It also just nicely formats a changelog and has some helpers for linking to the issues being referenced, which is probably why other folks use it too.

Spec / pytest-relaxed

Despite my verbosity, I value the ability to type as little as necessary, and was fed up with the JUnit style of test organization in Python’s unittest and spinoffs (how many times do we really need the word test in tests/test_module.py -> TestClass -> test_function?). I also enjoyed the “nested” style of test organization found in tools like Ruby’s rspec.

Combining these things, I wrote a nosetests plugin & CLI tool allowing for non-repetitious, nested test organization & easy-to-scan color output: spec.

In the years since Spec’s conception, nosetests has fallen out of favor, with all the mindshare (and ideas about how to write nontrivial test suites, and fun plugins, etc) going to pytest. I’m now following suit, and have rewritten Spec – now more powerful and less opinionated by default – as the pytest-relaxed plugin.

Roadmap

This lists what I expect to work on in the short/medium term across all projects, in priority order. ETAs are not available – please don’t ask for them :)

See the page footer for a last-modification date. I try to update every few weeks, depending on how long each task takes, and how much time I am allotted for OSS work from my dayjob (if any).

Recent work (or lack thereof)

  • Earlier 2023: lots of load-bearing feature work on all 3 major projects, including an experimental opt-in base layer in Paramiko for the long-awaited authentication rewrite; and typed-Python support landed in Invoke.
  • Later 2023: Paramiko protocol enhancements for Terrapin attack mitigations.
  • Late 2023 through early 2024: gave myself some slack due to dealing with my first ever layoff (!)
  • Early to mid 2024: ramped up at a new job (!)

Upcoming

  • 2024.06: previously-planned big family vacation, will be AFK
  • 2024.07: projects-wide administrivia catchup re: Python interpreter releases, dependency updates, etc.
  • 2024.07-8: will likely focus on Invoke features and major bugfixes, see below

Invoke

  • Parser enhancements, such as fixing longstanding problems with positional argument values, and making it easier for tasks to ‘forward’ arbitrary CLI args/values to inner run() calls.
  • Task-related features like sharing flags and data between tasks & calling tasks programmatically from other tasks, will probably be the next major focus.

Paramiko

  • Cryptography/security fixes, depending on how many were tackled in the previous release. Key types, cipher updates, etc.
  • Looking at what we’re missing vs OpenSSH - anything that seems like a major “win” and isn’t a ton of work is worth considering.

Fabric

  • Achieving feature parity with v1 - there’s still plenty of things on its upgrading page listed as “pending”.

Others

  • Releases is well overdue for feature changes, especially as my own needs elsewhere (fewer active release lines at a time) are becoming simpler. It’s not out of the question that a very different-feeling 3.x might arise.