Armin Ronacher

Programming

Armin Ronacher started his work in Open Source as a freelance developer for the German Ubuntu Community portal "ubuntuusers" through which he later became a founding member of the German Ubuntu Association in 2005.

While working on ubuntuusers, Ronacher re-discovered the Python programming language and wrote some of the earliest implementations for WSGI with the goal to write a bulletin board in Python together with Georg Brandl. This board was to be called "Pocoo" and to be a replacement for phpBB in Python. While the bulletin board never managed a stable release, many other projects appeared out of the Pocoo umbrella project: the Pygments syntax highlighter, the Sphinx documentation generator, the Jinja template engine and many other libraries for Python. He also contributed functionality for the Python AST module and the Ordered Dict for Python. After an elaborate April fool's joke where he bundled his libraries in a one-file microframework he decided to create the Flask web framework. It went on to become one of the two most popular web development frameworks (next to Django) for Python and the associated libraries found a new home under the "Pallets" community.

He also created the Lektor CMS and contributed to a large list of Open Source applications and libraries.

He worked for Plurk, for Fireteam (a game network infrastructure company owned by Splash Damage), and most recently for the Sentry crash reporting tool.

Armin Ronacher is a frequent speaker at Open Source conferences around the world.

Recognition

• 2003: 2nd place at the 2003 Prix Ars Electronica in the u19 freestyle computing for "Be a Bee"
• 2012: Fellow of the Python Software Foundation
• 2014: Python Software Foundation Community Service Award for his work in the Python Open Source community
• 2014: Shuttleworth Foundation flash grant