As has been discussed in detail in Nadia Eghbal’s Roads and Bridges, the CZI EOSS program announcement, and in the NumFocus sustainability program goals, much of the critical software that science and industry are built on is maintained by a primarily volunteer community. While this has worked, it is not sustainable in the long term for the health of many projects or their contributors.
We are happy to announce that we have hired Elliott Sales de Andrade (QuLogic) as the Matplotlib Software Research Engineering Fellow supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Essential Open Source Software for Science effective March 1, 2020!
Elliott has been contributing to a broad variety of Free and Open Source projects for several years. He is an active Matplotlib contributor and has had commit rights since October 2015. In addition to working on Matplotlib, Elliott has contributed to a wide range of projects in the Scientific Python software stack, both downstream and upstream of Matplotlib, including Cartopy, ObsPy, and NumPy. Outside of Python, Elliott is a developer on the Pidgin project and a packager for Fedora Linux. In his work on Matplotlib, he is interested in advancing science through reproducible workflows and more accessible libraries.
We are already seeing a reduction in the backlog of open issues and pull requests, which we hope will make the library easier to contribute to and maintain long term. We also benefit from Elliott having the bandwidth to maintain a library wide view of all the on-going work and open bugs. Hiring Elliott as an RSEF is the start of ensuring that Matplotlib is sustainable in the long term.
Looking forward to all the good work we are going to do this year!