Switch to new paste service
We migrate over to pinnwand as the service that powers our paste bin over at https://paste.pythondiscord.com/. We made the switch as it comes with native light/dark modes, support for multi-file pastes, additional support for text highlighting languages, and plus, it's written in Python!
Retirement of Joe and Sebastiaan
Having been at the helm of Python Discord for over 5 and 3 years respectively, Joe and Sebastiaan retire and step down. They gain the @Founders role and continue as advisors to the @Directors, the new name of the original @Owners role. At the same time, Mina and Zig join Leon as co-directors.
Switch to forum-based help system
We migrate our help system to use a forum channel, retiring our home-grown rotating help system after 3 years of service and nearly 500,000 help sessions. Forum channels offer a better experience as members can create their own dedicated thread in a discoverable place.
Python 3.11 Release Stream
With the Python 3.10 Release Stream being such a success, we brought it back for the release of Python 3.11. Hosted by Leon, and CPython 3.11 Release Manager, Pablo Galindo, they were joined by other CPython Core Developers. Together, they discuss the specific features and the overall development process of the release.
Summer Code Jam 2022 (CJ9)
We host the 9th Code Jam. This year, teams had to use websockets to create a project based on the theme, It's not a bug, it's a feature. In all, 24 teams submitted their projects. At the end, we held a livestream demoing the top 10 projects and announcing the winner!
Partnership with pyqtgraph
The #pyqtgraph channel is created for the Scientific Graphics and GUI
library pyqtgraph, joining #black-formatter.
Addition of @Sir Robin
Our arsenal of bots grows! We add @Sir Robin to power and manage all of our future events and to support the Events Team.
Trivia Night
How well do you know Python inside out? Members got to find out in a Trivia Night event. Contestants were given questions about Python's internals, its development, and more. To win, contestants had to get the most questions right while being fast to answer.
Creation of Events Team
We form the Events Team to organise and run future events. Led by Kat and comprised by staff members, the goal of the team is to ultimately host more events in a more sustainable way.
Deployment of Smarter Resources
We gave our resources pages some much needed love and reorganised them into a single page, complete with a shiny new resource filter that allows you to more quickly find ones that relate to your interests, experience, learning style, and ability to pay!
We hit 300 000 members!
Thanks to an increasing growth rate, Python Discord's membership count doubled from 150,000 to 300,000 in less than a year!
We host the Python 3.10 Release Stream
Leon and Pablo Galindo, CPython Core Developer and Release Manager, host the Python 3.10 Release Stream, joined by other core devs Carol Willing, Irit Katriel, Łukasz Langa, and Brandt Bucher. They talked in-depth about the new features introduced in 3.10, the development of those features, and more!
Partnership with Black
We partner with the uncompromising code formatter project, Black, who were looking for a
new home for their real-time chat. Python Discord ended up being that home, resulting in
the creation of the #black-formatter channel.
Summer Code Jam 2021 (CJ8)
We host the 8th now-annual Code Jam. Teams had to create a program with an text-based user interface (TUI), all designed around the theme of “think inside the box.” Ultimately, 51 teams submitted projects. The winning submissions are listed on our website.
Inaugural run of Pixels
Inspired by the subreddit, r/place, Pixels was our collaborative canvas event held between May 25 to June 14, providing a beginner-friendly API to paint pixels on a virtual canvas.
Later, we released a blog post summarizing what happened, our motives, and some stories from during development.
Owners become PSF Fellows
Joe, Leon, and Sebastiaan are recognized as Python Software Foundation Fellows for their substantial contributions to the Python ecosystem by fostering Python Discord.
Summer Code Jam 2020 Highlights
We release a new video to our YouTube showing the best projects from the Summer Code Jam 2020. Better late than never!
New feature: Weekly discussion channel
Every week (or two weeks), we'll be posting a new topic to discuss in a channel called #weekly-topic-discussion. Our inaugural topic is a PyCon talk by Anthony Shaw called Wily Python: Writing simpler and more maintainable Python..
We're on the Teaching Python podcast!
Leon joins Sean and Kelly on the Teaching Python podcast to discuss how the pandemic has changed the way we learn, and what role communities like Python Discord can play in this new world. You can find the episode at teachingpython.fm.
Leon Sandøy appears on Talk Python To Me
Leon goes on the Talk Python to Me podcast with Michael Kennedy to discuss the history of Python Discord, the critical importance of culture, and how to run a massive community. You can find the episode at talkpython.fm.
We now have 150,000 members!
Our growth continues to accelerate.
We release The PEP 8 song
We release the PEP 8 song on our YouTube channel, which finds tens of thousands of listeners!
Advent of Code attracts hundreds of participants
A total of 443 Python Discord members sign up to be part of Eric Wastl's excellent Advent of Code event. As always, we provide dedicated announcements, scoreboards, bot commands and channels for our members to enjoy the event in.
We migrate all our infrastructure to Kubernetes
As our tech stack grows, we decide to migrate all our services over to a container orchestration paradigm via Kubernetes. This gives us better control and scalability. Joe Banks takes on the role as DevOps Lead.
Python Discord hits 100,000 members!
Only six months after hitting 40,000 users, we hit 100,000 users. A monumental milestone, and one we're very proud of. To commemorate it, we create this timeline.
Python Discord hosts the 2020 CPython Core Developer Q&A
Python Discord is now the new home of the PyWeek event!
PyWeek, a game jam that has been running since 2005, joins Python Discord as one of our official events. Find more information about PyWeek on their official website.
PyDis summer code jam 2020 with the theme “Early Internet” and Django as the technology
Sponsored by the Django Software Foundation and JetBrains, the Summer Code Jam for 2020 attracts hundreds of participants, and sees the creation of some fantastic projects. Check them out in our judge stream below:
Python Discord Public Statistics are now live
After getting numerous requests to publish beautiful data on member count and channel use, we create stats.pythondiscord.com for all to enjoy.
Python Discord is now listed on python.org/community
After working towards this goal for months, we finally work out an arrangement with the PSF that allows us to be listed on that most holiest of websites: https://python.org/. There was much rejoicing.
ModMail is now live
Having originally planned to write our own ModMail bot from scratch, we come across an exceptionally good ModMail bot by kyb3r and decide to just self-host that one instead.
PyDis Game Jam 2020 with the “Three of a Kind” theme and Arcade as the technology
The creator of Arcade, Paul Vincent Craven, joins us as a judge. Several of the Code Jam participants also end up getting involved contributing to the Arcade repository.
Python Discord hits 40,000 members, and is now bigger than Liechtenstein.
The new help channel system is live
We release our dynamic help-channel system, which allows you to claim your very own help channel instead of fighting over the static help channels. We release a Help Channel Guide to help our members fully understand how the system works.
PyDis sixth code jam with the theme “Ancient technology” and the technology Kivy
Our Code Jams are becoming an increasingly big deal, and the Kivy core developers join us to judge the event and help out our members during the event. One of them, @tshirtman, even joins our staff!
PyDis hits 30,000 members
More than tripling in size since the year before, the community hits 30000 users. At this point, we're probably the largest Python chat community on the planet.
Sebastiaan Zeef becomes an owner
After being a long time active contributor to our projects and the driving force behind many of our events, Sebastiaan Zeef joins the Owners Team alongside Joe & Leon.
The code of conduct is created
Inspired by the Adafruit, Rust and Django communities, an essential community pillar is created; Our Code of Conduct.
The Django rewrite of pythondiscord.com is now live!
The site is getting more and more complex, and it's time for a rewrite. We decide to go for a different stack, and build a website based on Django, DRF, Bulma and PostgreSQL.
PyDis hits 15,000 members; the “hot ones special” video is released
django-simple-bulma is released on PyPi
Our very first package on PyPI, django-simple-bulma is a package that sets up the Bulma CSS framework for your Django application and lets you configure everything in settings.py.
PyDis hits 10,000 members
We partner with RLBot, move from GitLab to GitHub, and start putting together the first Advent of Code event.
First Hacktoberfest PyDis event; @Sir Lancebot is created
We create a second bot for our community and fill it up with simple, fun and relatively easy issues. The idea is to create an approachable arena for our members to cut their open-source teeth on, and to provide lots of help and hand-holding for those who get stuck. We're training our members to be productive contributors in the open-source ecosystem.
PyDis is now partnered with Discord; the vanity URL discord.gg/python is created
After being rejected for their Partner program several times, we finally get approved. The recent partnership with the r/Python subreddit plays a significant role in qualifying us for this partnership.
PyDis hits 5,000 members and partners with r/Python
As we continue to grow, we approach the r/Python subreddit and ask to become their official Discord community. They agree, and we become listed in their sidebar, giving us yet another source of new members.
Do You Even Python and PyDis merger
At this point in time, there are only two serious Python communities on Discord - Ours, and one called Do You Even Python. We approach the owners of DYEP with a bold proposal - let's shut down their community, replace it with links to ours, and in return we will let their staff join our staff. This gives us a big boost in members, and eventually leads to @eivl and @Mr. Hemlock joining our Admin team
The privacy policy is created
Since data privacy is quite important to us, we create a privacy page pretty much as soon as our new bot and site starts collecting some data. To this day, we keep our privacy policy up to date with all changes, and since April 2020 we've started doing monthly data reviews.
First code jam with the theme “snakes”
Our very first Code Jam attracts a handful of users who work in random
teams of 2. We ask our participants to write a snake-themed Discord bot. Most of the code written
for this jam still lives on in Sir Lancebot, and you can play with it by using the
.snakes command. For more information on this event, see the event page
PyDis hits 2,000 members; pythondiscord.com and @Python are live
The public moderation bot we're using at the time, Rowboat, announces it will be shutting down. We decide that we'll write our own bot to handle moderation, so that we can have more control over its features. We also buy a domain and start making a website in Flask.
Our logo is born. Thanks @Aperture!
Python Discord hits 1,000 members
Our main source of new users at this point is a post on Reddit that happens to get very good SEO. We are one of the top 10 search engine hits for the search term "python discord".
Python Discord is created
Joe Banks becomes one of the owners around 3 days after it is created, and Leon Sandøy (lemon) joins the owner team later in the year, when the community has around 300 members.