• Most popular repositories
• Skyfield astronomy library
• Conference talks
• Python Patterns site

I still actively maintain the two educational resources that are at the top of the list of my most popular repositories — the code examples from my Python Network Programming book, and the exercises from my famous Pandas Tutorial that teaches dataframes using the IMDB movie database. When users open new issues, I try to get them fixed so the tutorials remain in working condition even on newer systems.

But most of my week-to-week open source work is focused on making astronomy accessible to amateurs and professionals who use Python. For two decades I have been author and maintainer of the venerable PyEphem library, that wraps an old C library to provide Python programmers with positions for planets, comets, and Earth satellites. I am told that the library is at this moment in orbit above us, aboard recent satellites that use Python for some of their system software!

I spend even more time these days on my modern Skyfield library that not only produces planet and Earth satellite positions using more accurate NumPy-accelerated math, but offers a much improved API that causes users less confusion than its predecessor.

I travel several times each year to speak at community-run conferences, usually taking the time to write a new talk instead of repeating an old one. I have also been slowly building a Python Design Patterns site to bring together several ideas from my talks and make them more accessible and searchable.

I should stress that I am able to continue making open source contributions whether sponsorship is available or not. If you are forced to choose between sponsoring me and sponsoring a programmer who depends on it as their only income, you can choose the other programmer with a clear conscience. But several folks have asked recently how to make contributions toward my public work, and I’m happy to accept such thanks as you are pleased to offer.