Hi everyone! 👋

I hope all of you are doing great and have started using Zarr-Python 3! If not, install it using pip install -U zarr and let us know your thoughts.

I have some news to share with the Zarr community—after three wonderful years of managing the Zarr project and its community, I’m officially stepping down as the community manager. My position was funded through the CZI EOSS grant, which finished towards the end of 2024!

It’s been quite a journey and an excellent opportunity to learn, grow and connect with like-minded people in the scientific ecosystem. I’m fortunate that I was able to use my skills to contribute to the project. I’d like to specially thank my mentor and PI, Josh Moore. Josh has been very kind and understanding and has always been just, responsible and careful towards me. I couldn’t be more lucky to have him on my side.

Brief summary of my journey

The ‘Community Manager’ role in technical projects involves wearing multiple hats while fostering and growing the community. It was a great opportunity which helped me learn a lot of new stuff. I want to highlight some of the essential things I’ve done in my role over the past few years.

  • ZEP—Zarr is an amazing project with lovely contributors from diverse domains across the globe. It’s great to see people contributing to a project and bringing fresh perspectives. But sometimes, this also poses a challenge. When I joined, discussions on the Zarr V3 specification were ongoing. There was a lot of good feedback on the design and what V3 specification should be, but it was scattered all around GitHub issues and pull requests in multiple repositories. We knew what we wanted to do, but there was a serious lack of a process that would help us get from start to finish. So, I started working on a community feedback process, later known as the Zarr Enhancement Proposal. If you’d like to read more, I wrote a blog post back in 2022. The ZEP process worked great and helped us in finalising the V3 specification (ZEP1) and Sharding specification (ZEP2).

  • Maintaining projects under Zarr—Looking after the community also serendipitously led me to take care of several repositories under the Zarr banner. At first, I launched the Zarr blog using Jekyll and GitHub page and started writing about releases, contributor guides, roadmaps, etc. Then, I revamped the Zarr website to add more content and launched another website to maintain a record of Zarr community meeting notes and community calendar at (https://zarr.dev/community-calls/). Over time, I also launched the ZEP website, at (https://zarr.dev/zeps/). While I was solidifying the Zarr online presence, I was also fixing bugs, assisting in releases, and sending minor patches to the Zarr-Python repository. I also ensured that all project licenses and the Code of Conduct were current and compliant, reinforcing our commitment to community standards and values.

  • Running meetings—One of the important duties of a community manager is to run community meetings and ensure that all the attendees feel welcome. We host bi-weekly meetings for the community. We also used to run ZEP meetings bi-weekly (which we recently stopped) to discuss ZEP proposals. Apart from both these meetings, I also run office hours, which I started back in early 2023. Office hours have been a great time for interaction with the community, where new/experienced users join in, and I help them with their questions. I’ve had some great conversations over the years with the participants — some even led to open-source contributions to libraries like Xarray (https://github.com/pydata/xarray/pull/9014).

  • Public speaking—I started speaking on Zarr a couple of months after joining. I remember my first presentation was with Ryan Abernathy at a Cloud Native Geospatial event. I spoke about Zarr specifications and their implementations in multiple languages. Since then, I’ve spoken at various conferences and meet-ups. Please see my webpage https://sanketverma.com/talks/ for the full list.

  • Representing project interests—Over the years, I have been engaged with multiple steering committees to represent Zarr and its community. See the complete list at https://sanketverma.com/about/#open-source-engagement. These steering committees drive interesting projects in the open-source ecosystem. For example, the Scientific Python ecosystem is a federation of community-developed and community-owned Python projects widely used in scientific research. I serve on the SPEC steering committee to represent the interests of Zarr.

  • Mentor newcomers—Onboarding newcomers to the project was yet another important duty of mine. Aside from mentoring users regularly, Zarr inaugurated their participation in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy in 2022. Both these programs are structured to provide a platform for motivated individuals to contribute to open source. Josh and I mentored a couple of interns in both programs.

I also wanted to showcase other things on the list, but I should move on to the next section for now. ;)

What’s changed?

Since my time as the community manager has come to an end, I think it’s one of my responsibilities to start delegating the stuff I was responsible for to ensure a smooth transition. We have combined the Zarr community and the ZEP meetings—as I was running these meetings, we needed to make sure that meetings would continue to take place with minimal disruption.

We’ll be reducing the frequency of Zarr office hours—currently, we hold them every 2 weeks, and now we plan to have them once a month. Yes, you guessed it right, I’ll continue to interact and assist the community during office hours.

The other meetings remain unaffected on our community calendar. Our community calendar (https://zarr.dev/community-calls/) lists all the meetings and is open to join for everyone. Also, our ZulipChat (https://ossci.zulipchat.com/) continues flourishing and hosting great conversations; please drop by and say ‘Hi’ to the community.

What’s next?

I love the project and the wonderful humans who contribute and use it. Over the last few years, I’ve become quite familiar with Zarr’s inner workings, both technical and non-technical. I’ve also acquired a lot of invaluable institutional knowledge of the project. I plan to continue contributing to the project and will participate in the meetings listed on the community calendar, primarily in a reduced capacity for some time. I’ve taken some time for myself and have been learning new stuff. Keep an eye out for my blog. ;)

I think the CZI EOSS grant was the most direct way to work and contribute to the project, and I’d like to wholeheartedly thank the CZI for funding us. I also want to thank the Zarr steering council and the open-source community for their collective support, feedback and encouragement throughout the years!

As of today, I’m actively searching for new positions to leverage my technical and community leadership experience. Please ping me if you think I’m a good fit for your team or if you just want to have a nice chat. I’d be happy to discuss my experience or help you. You can find my info here.

See you around in the meetings or probably a conference near you! ;)

Peace! ✌🏻

~Sanket Verma