Fred Drake
Sr. Software Engineer at Python Software Foundation
Reston, Virginia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolFred Drake is a senior software engineer with 29 years of experience specializing in content management systems, JSON:API, XML, and Python libraries. Based in Reston, VA, he has longstanding involvement with the Python community as a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation and contributors to core projects such as setuptools and the Python PEP tooling. His career spans hands-on roles from core interpreter work and agent systems to hosted application deployment and customer-facing support, reflecting deep backend and systems expertise. At Zope Corporation and Keeper Technology he combined library and application development with operational responsibilities, and he now brings that breadth to TrEd Solutions. Beyond coding, Fred has a background in architecture and an MS in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, which informs his pragmatic, systems-level approach to design. Notably, his open-source contributions include improving packaging and PEP presentation tooling—work that quietly improves developer workflows across the Python ecosystem.
29 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
MS, Computer Science, MS, Computer Science at Virginia Tech
English
Github Skills (17)
sysctl10
python10
scripting10
build-system10
os-development10
platform-specific10
configuration-file10
html10
css9
regular-expression9
documentation9
cli8
command-line-interface8
command-line8
webscraping8
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
python/peps
Jul 2000 - Nov 2018
Python Enhancement Proposals
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:90 commits, 1 PR, 2 comments in 18 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Fred primarily focused on enhancing the `pep2html.py` script within the Python Enhancement Proposals repository. Their contributions included improving the HTML output's aesthetics, introducing options for local use, and modifying the script's behavior regarding RFC and email address handling. They also updated the script for improved presentation, incorporating CSS styling and moving the publication site for the PEPs. They also developed a script to update online PEPs.
python310pythonenhancementproposalspython-3
pypa/setuptools
Jan 1999 - Apr 2008
Official project repository for the Setuptools build system
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:39 commits in 9 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Fred primarily contributed to the `setuptools` project, a build system for Python packages. Their commits involved adding and updating docstrings to improve code documentation. They also focused on refining the `sysconfig.py` module, specifically addressing platform-specific configurations for different operating systems (NT and Posix). Furthermore, the user implemented style and code improvements for better conformity.
setuptoolsbuild-system
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