About Julython

Julython was founded in 2012 at an Austin Python Users Group meeting. The idea is loosely based on the now defunct National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), where participants were encouraged to write a novel in 30 days during November. Our goal is to get people to contribute to open source code bases and make it fun and rewarding. Register your repositories with our webhook system and we'll record and score your commits throughout the month.

We chose July because we noticed attendance at our meetups dropped off in the summer — it seems people are less interested in coding when it's nice outside!

Goals

🎉

Have Fun!

The most important rule. Enjoy the journey.

🧠

Learn Something New

Try a new language, framework, or project.

🤝

Be Kind

Don't be rude or mean to others in the game.

Many of the original participants were Python programmers and the majority of repositories are still Python-based today — but there's no language requirement. Score points by contributing to repositories; the more you link and commit to, the higher your score.

Fair Play & AI

It's pretty easy to game this system, so we've introduced a few rules to limit bad actors and spam. With the rise of LLMs and agentic coding it's even easier to run up a score artificially — so we've added some guardrails.

What counts

• Only commits merged into the default branch are scored.
• Merge commits are excluded.
• Rate limits apply to prevent commit flooding.
• AI-assisted commits are welcome — as long as they serve goals #1 and #2 above.

Anti-patterns

Attacking others through project names or flooding open source maintainers with low-quality contributions will not be tolerated. There are no prizes — if that's how you want to spend your nights and weekends, please do so somewhere else.

* Violating these norms may result in your account and all associated points being removed.

The Future

We want to push you to try new things and make software development fun and accessible. Our website and tools are designed to nudge you to keep your score ticking up a little every day.

Introducing majordomo

We're working on a local assistant called majordomo. It watches your repositories using the same webhooks you set up for Julython, but runs locally — so it can track branches and PRs and help ensure you're writing tests and following good patterns as you develop.

To protect your privacy and keep costs minimal, majordomo is designed to work with local models only. The full details are still being worked out, but the direction is clear: a private, low-cost coding companion that helps you grow as a developer.

Questions? Reach us at help@julython.org.