2025 was a big year for urllib3 and I want you to read about it! In case you missed it, this year I passed the baton of “lead maintainer” to Illia Volochii who has a new website and blog. Quentin Pradet and I continue to be maintainers to the project.

If you are reading my blog to keep up-to-date on the latest in urllib3 I highly recommend following both Illia and Quentin's blogs, as I will likely publish less and less about urllib3 here going forward. The leadership change was a part of my observation of Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day in the spring of last year.

This isn't goodbye, but I would like to take a moment to be reflective. Being a contributor to urllib3 from 2016 to now has had an incredibly positive impact on my life and livelihood. I am forever grateful for my early open source mentors: Cory Benfield and Thea "Stargirl" Flowers, who were urllib3 leads before me. I've also met so many new friends from my deep involvement with Python open source, it really is an amazing network of people! 💜

urllib3 was my first opportunity to work on open source full-time for a few weeks on a grant about improving security. urllib3 became an early partner with Tidelift, leading me to investigate and write about open source security practices and policies for Python projects. My positions at Elastic and the Python Software Foundation were likely influenced by my involvement with urllib3 and other open source Python projects.

In short: contributing to open source is an amazing and potentially life-changing opportunity.