Jan 12, 2026

It’s been almost eleven years since the creation of “PEP 492 – Coroutines with async and await syntax” by Yury Selivanov. I’ve been writing asynchronous Python on and off for about a decade, and still, async/await is the most complex part of Python for me. Recently, I wrote a synchronous generator that yields results from an asynchronous iterable. What a ride! Back in the days of the PEP 492, Yury was working on EdgeDB, a wrapper layer around PostgreSQL. In a way, he still is, but it’s called Gel, and is a part of Vercel (but the page title still says EdgeDB, lol).

Let’s see what the people working on PEP 492 are up to:

  • Guido van Rossum - the creator and benevolent dictator of Python. Retired from Dropbox in 2019, just to join Microsoft as a Distinguished Engineer in 2020.

  • Victor Stinner - one of the performance-focused Python core contributors. These days, his good work is paid for by IBM through Red Hat.

  • Elvis Pranskevichus - Yury’s buddy, working with him in Vercel.

  • Andrew Svetlov - aiohttp maintainer, works as a VP of Engineering at Apolo.US, which at first glance looks the same as a hundred other AI startups.

  • Łukasz Langa - ex-Facebook core Python developer, author of Black, and release manager. Moved to a mid-sized Polish town, and doesn’t show up much.

  • Greg Ewing - the winner of the ugliest homepage award.

  • Stephen J. Turnbull - seemingly, a Mailman (The GNU Mailing List manager) maintainer.

  • Brett Cannon - Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft in Canada and Python core developer.

  • Alyssa Coghlan - Nicholas, at the time of the PEP, CPython core and packaging developer, supported by an Australian bank. Surprisingly, not working on uv.

The rest of the people I never heard about:

  • Paul Moore - core developer of Python and pip.

  • Nathaniel Smith - a scientist, doing science stuff, but somehow deep in the Python community.

  • Stefan Behnel - core developer of Python, maintainer of Cython and lxml.

  • Paul Sokolovsky - author of a minimalistic Python dialect and a web framework written in that dialect.

  • Victor Petrovykh - another member of the EdgeDB mafia.

  • Steven D’Aprano - the only guy who got suspended from being a Core Developer for public misconduct.

  • Ethan Furman

  • Jim J. Jewett