Jul 11th, 2023

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!

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Jan 30th, 2023

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.

Nov 25th, 2022

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.

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Oct 24th, 2022

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.

July 21st, 2022

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!

May 19th, 2022

Partnership with pyqtgraph

The #pyqtgraph channel is created for the Scientific Graphics and GUI library pyqtgraph, joining #black-formatter.

Feb 21st, 2022

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.

Feb 12th, 2022

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.

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Feb 9th, 2022

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.

Feb 2nd, 2022

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!

Jan 19, 2022

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!

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Oct 4th, 2021

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!

May 24th, 2021

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.

July 9, 2021

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.

May 24, 2021

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.

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April 23, 2021

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.

Mar 21st, 2021

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!

Mar 13th, 2021

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..

Mar 13th, 2021

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.

Mar 1st, 2021

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.

Feb 18th, 2021

We now have 150,000 members!

Our growth continues to accelerate.

February 8th, 2021

We release The PEP 8 song

We release the PEP 8 song on our YouTube channel, which finds tens of thousands of listeners!

December 1st - 25th, 2020

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.

Nov 29th, 2020

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.

Oct 22nd, 2020

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.

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Oct 21st, 2020

Python Discord hosts the 2020 CPython Core Developer Q&A

Aug 16th, 2020

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.

Jul 31st, 2020

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:

Jun 4th, 2020

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.

May 28th, 2020

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.

May 25th, 2020

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.

Apr 17th, 2020

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.

Apr 14, 2020

Python Discord hits 40,000 members, and is now bigger than Liechtenstein.

Apr 5th, 2020

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.

Jan 17, 2020

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!

Dec 22nd, 2019

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.

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Sept 22nd, 2019

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.

Oct 26th, 2019

The code of conduct is created

Inspired by the Adafruit, Rust and Django communities, an essential community pillar is created; Our Code of Conduct.

Sep 15, 2019

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.

Apr 8th, 2019

PyDis hits 15,000 members; the “hot ones special” video is released

Dec 19th, 2018

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.

Nov 24th, 2018

PyDis hits 10,000 members

We partner with RLBot, move from GitLab to GitHub, and start putting together the first Advent of Code event.

Oct 1st, 2018

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.

Jul 10th, 2018

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.

Jun 20th, 2018

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.

Jun 9th, 2018

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

May 21st, 2018

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.

Mar 23rd, 2018

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

Mar 4th, 2018

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.

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Feb 3rd, 2018

Our logo is born. Thanks @Aperture!

Nov 10th, 2017

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".

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Jan 8th, 2017

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.