I am now the SymPy project leader

You can imagine my surprise when I opened my email last Monday and saw this message from Ondrej:

Hi Aaron,

would you like to become the main maintainer/project leader for sympy?
In the last year, it is clearly you, who does most of the work, and
also your blog has quite some visibility now.
It’d be cool to do some release from time to time. Mateusz is
finishing is poly’s branch, so probably his code would go into the
release.

So I guess now I am the project leader for SymPy. As to what exactly this means, I am not yet entirely sure, but so far it has meant that I get to do a lot more work than before (yay!).

Actually, the work is because I have spent the last week working nonstop to get things ready to do a release. I should have a release candidate for SymPy 0.7.0 ready some time next week. I’ll post more here about what’s change, but this is going to be a big release. The biggest change will be the new polys, which makes things much faster and more powerful.

Also, I will try to post things here relating to SymPy as a whole, not just my work.

Ondrej, by the way, isn’t going anywhere. He plans on doing some work on ways to get SymPy out to more people by writing more/better web and mobile interfaces for it. A big thanks to Ondrej and the SymPy community for making such an awesome piece of software!

2010 in review

Here’s some silly thing that WordPress sent me:

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 6,800 times in 2010. That’s about 16 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 16 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 41 posts. There were 7 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 1mb.

The busiest day of the year was July 4th with 103 views. The most popular post that day was The Risch Algorithm: Part 1.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were code.google.com, planet.sympy.org, facebook.com, stackoverflow.com, and socghop.appspot.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for risch algorithm, pudb, integrate exponential, equations with homogeneous coefficients, and xcode trailing whitespace.

I have linked the search terms to their respective Google searches, so you can see how far up my blog posts are in the results list.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

The Risch Algorithm: Part 1 June 2010
3 comments

2

How to get both 32-bit and 64-bit Python in Snow Leopard November 2009
5 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

3

Modifying a list while looping through it in Python July 2009
13 comments

4

Integration of exponential functions July 2010
3 comments

5

First Order Differential Equations with Homogeneous Coefficients May 2009
2 comments

I wonder where things are coming from from Facebook. I do not have an account there, so I can’t search it to find out.