Looking back on 2024 here are some personal highlights:
Early in 2024 I took over maintenance of the very useful Python package pye57 for
reading and writing e57 format pointcloud files. I have been using it at work for several years and was
worried that it was not being maintained, blocking upgrade of our project to Python 3.11.
I had already started working on an alternative library, cleverly titled e57 - essentially I got in touch with
the project maintainer, providing some evidence that I was a real human being not a sham account,
many thanks to David Caron for creating the library and maintaining it for so many years, and for trusting
me to carry it on.
In the first 6 months 6 months I and other contributors ensured that pye57 now supports Python 11 and 12 and macOS is now supported (on apple silicon only). There are 3 or 4 new contributors beside myself with a few bug fixes, quality of life improvements, photo writing, and an update to a more recent version of libe57Format I closed 10+ issues and saw some engagement from past contributors in the issue tracker and PR comments. I once released broken wheels to pypi and reverted them within a few hours. Wheels are now tested in ci before release.
Looking for a feature flags library I came across Django Waffle, which looked good but the ci tests were a couple of versions behind and the docs were broken and looked sparse and outdated, including some references to Django version 1! I started contributing and after a rough start getting up to speed with other contributors' expectations of git workflow and PR etiquette I made 9 contributions, mostly around the documentation and testing. This gave me enough confidence to adopt the library at work and I'm very happy with it so far.
I continued contributing to the Nantes Python Meetup, kicking off some collaborations with other meetups in Nantes and I went to the Nantes React meetup twice as well, which was very nice. Unfortunately I couldn't make it to PyCon France in 2024 but I submitted a proposal for DjangoCon Europe at the end of 2024 and I'm very happy to have been accepted and looking forward to visiting Dublin for the first time in 20 years.
I found the motivation and skilz to solve roughly the first half of the puzzles in this year's event. I was less motivated than in previous years but there were some fun challenges in there.
A few other highlights: