Last week I gave a keynote speech at PyCon DE. It was about a number of topics, too many topics, in fact (I went over my allotted time, something I regret). One topic was described by a friend as me "coming out of the closet" about my exit from Zope.

So let's come out of the closet on my blog too. A few years ago, I stopped my involvement with Zope. I gave up hope about Zope becoming more creative again as a web framework, and stopped my futile efforts to push it in that direction. For me, the days of Zope are over. Leaving Zope was difficult for me -- I am a passionate software developer and I had been involved with Zope since its inception as an open source project in 1998.

In fact, I still use Zope, through Grok, though Grok is now in maintenance mode as well. I use Zope a lot conceptually, when I approach new problem domains like programming the web browser (Obviel) or creating a new server-side web framework (morepath). The lessons and patterns I learned from Zope will never go away. Though I don't work on it anymore, Zope is still on my mind.

In a few [edit: more than a few!] upcoming blog entries I will talk a bit about Zope and my involvement in it. Perhaps it will be of interest to some.

I will post the entries in this series here: