The Python community didn’t exclude Kenneth because of his condition, at least directly. They excluded him because of his actions and history of shady, manipulative behaviors.
And while workplaces should be accommodating, there’s a point where it gets to be too much.
I worked at a place with a person with similar behaviors and it destroyed that company because they refused to acknowledge reality: this was a business, not a care facility.
One thing is clear: Kenneth is suffering. I hope that he is able to see his behavior from the outside and heal. He’s a great programmer who ships products.
For those who don’t know, Kenneth created the Requests library which is nearly ubiquitous in the Python world.
It's central to understand that mental health can alter perception and judgment, even common mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.
I have chronic depression, and even after treating it for 15 years, I still realizes after the fact, despite being attentive to how I behave, that I just think differently when I am depressed.
It's very common for mentally ill people to think they are being persecuted. We also should still inform people more about mental illness, so both are true.
Illnesses that involves psychosis are not a joke and more severe than your average depression, and sadly I would be careful and not 100% trustworthy of somebody who is having such illness.
I read the post and felt a lot of sympathy. Then I saw your response and re-read the post and it comes across as quite manipulative (if your statements are factually correct). My comment is less about this person (great library, btw), but more how it is Interesting how context can totally change how words on a page are received.
One thing i noticed while reading the post is he doesn’t go into what events led people to be fearful of him. I’ve known someone with schizoaffective disorder and the episodes can be downright scary. You can have sympathy for someone while also knowing it’s a bad idea to let your guard down while they’re holding a fork.
> I think a lot of people don't realize how little Reitz actually has to do with Requests development. For many years now, actual maintenance has been done almost exclusively by other volunteers. If you look at the maintainers list on PyPI, you'll see he doesn't have PyPI rights to his own project, because he kept breaking stuff, so the real maintainers insisted on revoking his access. If you clone the Requests git repo, you can run git log requests/ to see a list of every time someone changed the library's source code, either directly or by merging someone else's pull request. The last time Reitz did either was in May 2017, when he made some whitespace cleanups.
This is interesting. I can imagine that going both ways - maybe he feels like he's lost control over the project and that worsens his other reactions?
I think the important thing here is that Kenneth came up with Requests and did the initial implementation beginning in 2011.
The author is referring to Kenneth's involvement in Requests at that time (2019), long after its creation. Substantial work has been done on Requests since he stepped away from the project, but it was born from him.
Oh yeah I don't mean to diminish that part. Rather, I'm thinking this might actually be one of the things he's talking about in the post? Whatever happened that the maintainers took over the repo, that could be a point of tension and maybe a loss of control for him. Which would definitely make you feel like the community was isolating you, right?
Different sides to the story, and neither post here explains exactly what happened with Requests.
"i'm sorry, hope we can continue working together in the future" seems like a very mild response to allegedly fumbling 30k, but what do i know...
> the asynchronous landscape within Python's ecosystem failed to meet my expectations, leading me to conclude that Requests should retain its synchronous nature.
i concluded that the ecosystem does things differently than my personal standards, so i'm gonna revert and keep the money. nice.
no idea why i wrote the wrong name, sorry about that, Kenneth!
you personally replying to my comment makes me regret the harsh tone of my initial comment, could've just posted your blog post and fairly criticize it instead of taking the gossipy route...
doesn't make it better that i misnamed you and that this is a comment chain below a post of yours venting about your experiences of others treating you differentely. hope you can find more people like Sarah or just a better work environment in general.
>In short: He chose a fundraiser structure that avoids standard accountability mechanisms he was familiar with. He never had any plan or capability to deliver what he promised. And when I offered a way for him to do it anyway, he gave me some bafflegab about how expensive it is to write docs. Effectively, his public promises about how he would use the Requests 3 money were lies from start to finish, and he hasn't shown any remorse or even understanding that this is a problem.
A similar (but unrelated) fundraiser mechanism is why I no longer donate to any fundraisers, online (no accountability, no refunds). I'm looking at you µOptics >:-|
Written by Nathaniel Smith, who also got Oliphant out of the NumPy Steering Council? And that linked post was approved by the CoC compliant Python Steering Council, a later version of which canceled and defamed Tim Peters?
Maybe Smith is right on the facts here, but the methods are despicable.
I don't know any of these people, I just thought this blog post seemed credible and painted a very different picture of Reitz than he presents in his own blog.
I do not know the truth, i just thought people might appreciate another perspective.
CoCs suck because the newly empowered people often wield it like a blunt hammer to bludgeon everyone they don't like. They're almost always applied arbitrarily and unfairly. They have the noble goal of equalization but they're really just a co-opting of power by a new in-group.
This blog post is nothing like that. They're not asking you to silence Kenneth, or ignore him, or oust him from anything. They're just laying down the facts. The post isn't even asking you to stop interacting with, it's just a heads-up for anyone who does.
The depth of the politics of the python community is very funny to someone that knows nothing about the community. You are expecting a lot of background knowledge about the opinions of OSS maintainers.
It's kind of like having very strong opinions about the council of yoyo judges and their dramas.
And while workplaces should be accommodating, there’s a point where it gets to be too much.
I worked at a place with a person with similar behaviors and it destroyed that company because they refused to acknowledge reality: this was a business, not a care facility.
One thing is clear: Kenneth is suffering. I hope that he is able to see his behavior from the outside and heal. He’s a great programmer who ships products.
For those who don’t know, Kenneth created the Requests library which is nearly ubiquitous in the Python world.