As a happy tox customer I volunteered to help in preparing the next release by reviewing pull requests and going through the issues. I also did some conceptual work with nicoddemus and Stephan Obermann.

In my work on pytest I had the honour of dropping the dot together with Dave Hunt for the 3.0 release. I also proposed and implemented a deprecation policy.

After the sprint I did not have much spare time to get more involved, which bugged me, so I started to sound out the option of integrating this into my work at Avira. As pytest/tox/devpi is something we heavily rely on, I was able to secure the support of my team and management to spend 20% of my time on tox development starting in 2017.

To get started I …

• joined the conversations on the issue tracker about problems and enhancements to develop an understanding about what is needed and how things can be improved
• labelled all open issues (and am determined to keep it that way)
• identified invalid/fixed/duplicate issues (a third of ~180 issues were closed as a result)

These and similar activities around open source projects where coined as open source gardening by Steve Klabnik. I think they are just as important as contributing code to keep a project healthy and I will concentrate on this field of work for the time being.

Acknowledgements 🔗

I am grateful that Avira is aware of the importance of open source and gives me the chance to contribute regularly as part of my work. I’d like to thank Martin Held, Andreas Flach and Gitte Klitgaard for their support in getting this on the road.