Engaging with the wider community

In this chapter, we have focused mostly on how to use and contribute to open source software. While the coding part of open source is certainly vital, focusing only on code misses the larger point of open source. Open source, by its very nature, encourages a robust and active community. Knowing how to engage with the community will make you a more effective developer because you will have more resources available to you. Beyond that, it's worth thinking about the sense of fulfillment you get from helping people, and the good karma others can earn by helping you.

Most discussion about Python, and for many open source projects in general, happens on mailing lists. The official python.org mailing lists can be found at https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo. Also of interest is the comp.lang.python Usenet group. Quite a community has sprung up around Python, centered on its mailing lists and other groups.

There are other more general resources, such as the question...