Twisted Pleasures Of Open Source 'Sprint' Worth My Weekend

Twisted is an open source project. Open source projects traditionally rely, at least partly, on the contributions of volunteers. Twisted has been around for almost a decade, and certainly hasn’t hit doom yet. Like other open source works such as Firefox and Linux, it has continued to grow and gain wider recognition over time, becoming the parent of dozens of other free code projects which rely on it. In the case of Twisted, it also drives some of the tools underlying commercial and government institutions like Lucasfilm, Nasa, TweetDeck, and Canonical.

I would explain what Twisted does at this point, but that really is not germane to this column. (If you must know, it’s an asynchronous event-driven library for Python, which lets you write code with deferred promises instead of blocking functions; pray do not ask me to explain it again.) But what it really is, to me, is the very model of a well-managed, but itinerant, open source project.

It’s used by thousands of people, but has no true home except on the internet. What appears to drive its development is the enjoyment its engineers get from building it, and the deliberate openness of the project to new blood like me...