Add a blog post covering Daniel's work on Spyder 6 and beyond

src/routes/blog/spyder-6-daniel/+page.md

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+---
+title:
+author: Editor migration, remote dev QA, test suite overhaul and more
+  - dalthviz
+  - camgerlach
+tags: Feature, Spyder6
+category: Releases
+pub_date: 2024-12-13
+summary: Beyond the headline features, there's a lot more new and improved under the hood in Spyder 6. Daniel Althviz, Spyder's release manager and co-maintainer, was at the forefront of much of it, and we're here to share the highlights with all of you and what he plans to work on next!
+---
+
+[Daniel Althviz](https://github.com/dalthviz) is one of our longest-tenured Spyder developers, having started working on the project near the end of 2016.
+Now eight years later, he's the project's co-maintainer and its our release manager, responsible for the many steps required to release Spyder across all our various platforms.
+On top of that, he is also the lead maintainer of two of the most important libraries on which Spyder, and a lot of other software depends: the [QtPy](https://github.com/spyder-ide/qtpy) GUI abstraction layer and the [QtAwesome](https://github.com/spyder-ide/qtawesome) icon font framework.
+
+In 2023, Spyder received a [Chan Zuckerberg Initiative](https://chanzuckerberg.com/) Essential Open Source Software for Science [Cycle 5 grant, number 384](https://chanzuckerberg.com/eoss/proposals/enhancing-spyder-ide-remote-support-for-scientific-research-in-python/) to support a new remote development architecture and features in Spyder and related development.
+This has helped us fund Daniel's work on many of his contributions to Spyder 6 connected to that!
+
+Thanks to all of that, Daniel has put in a lot of work toward Spyder 6's development.
+Read on to hear the highlights!<br><br>
+
+
+![The Spyder Contributions page on GitHub, showing a graph of all contributions over time, and Daniel highlighted as the number two contributor between Feb 1 2023 and the present, after lead maintainer Carlos Cordoba](daniel-contributions.png "Daniel has the second-most contributions to the core Spyder repository since Feb 2023")
+
+## Spyder Editor migration to new plugin API
+
+We introduced a brand new plugin API with Spyder 5, and as part of that refactored most of Spyder's panes and many other of its internal components to be plugins that use it, rather than tightly coupled with Spyder itself.
+That both makes Spyder much more modular and easier to maintain, but also gives external plugins all the same power and flexibility that those Spyder internal panes and components have!
+However, the one major exception to that in Spyder 5 was the Editor, which wasn't migrated yet due to the high level of complexity and the further new features that would need to be added to the plugin API.
+
+Migrating the Editor to use the modular plugin API was the final piece of the puzzle to complete the API migration making Spyder a fully modular, pluggable application, avoid having to maintain two duplicate APIs and allow interoperability with other plugins, such as those being developed for remote development in Spyder 6.
+Therefore, along with its related API additions and improvements, it also was a prerequisite for fully implementing our new remote development architecture.
+Therefore, we prioritized it for Spyder 6, with Daniel taking the lead on implementing it!
+
+Given the size of the task, Daniel split it into a number of steps, each corresponding to a GitHub Pull Request.
+First, [he split](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/pull/20893) the ``CodeEditor``, the main widget for editing code, into a component in charge of code completion and linting, and another one in charge of editing.
+This helped separate those concerns and improve improve overall modularity and maintainability.
+Then, [he refactored the ``EditorStack`` code](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/pull/21194), the widget in charge of displaying multiple tabbed ``CodeEditor`` views, to facilitate the migration.
+Finally, he migrated the Editor itself to the new API in two steps: an [initial migration](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/pull/21353), and a [followup cleanup](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/pull/22005).
+This last step alone took six months of hard work, but it will help to address a lot of technical debt accumulated throughout the years.<br><br>
+
+
+![The Spyder remote kernel status dialog showing a successful connection, next to the IPython Console showing a kernel error](remote-kernel-issue-windows.png "Daniel helped find and solve remote development issues like this one")
+
+## Remote development architecture quality testing
+
+Once the Editor migration was moving along, helped review, test and QA the new remote development architecture.
+As part of that, he also developed a number of fixes and improvements to address the issues he found.
+From that, he [implemented UI/UX improvements](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/pull/22303) for the graphical components used to create a remote connection, based on the issues he found.
+
+Furthermore, during his checks of remote connections were working on Windows, he discovered several errors with when running async code, which [he fixed](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/pull/22137).
+Finally, he also encountered problems when trying to tunnel ports through SSH, which he [also solved](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/pull/22223](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/pull/22223).
+This all helped make our remote development architecture much more stable and usable.
+
+
+## Spyder test suite overhaul
+
+To help support testing of Spyder 6 and its new components, Daniel helped make the Spyder test suite faster and more robust.
+The core team was witnessing constant errors and delays when running automated tests in continuous integration systems, which made it necessary for Daniel invest several weeks to fix that so that the Spyder 6 development process was smoother.
+Therefore, [Daniel's work](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/pull/22077) improved this situation, as well as making the tests more efficient overall.<br><br>
+
+
+![Spyder's file switcher dialog, with a path box to enter a file name above a list of matching files and their properties](file-switcher-improvements.png "Spyder's File Switcher, with the improvements from Daniel and Angela's work")
+
+## Review work and project management
+
+Much of Daniel's responsibilities involve reviewing, mentoring and assisting with the work of other developers, an important role in any project.
+Daniel helped [Ryan Clary](https://github.com/mrclary), the developer who created a new set of installers for Spyder 6 using [Conda-Constructor](https://conda.github.io/constructor/), which are more powerful, flexible and updateble, and support installing packages, environments and Spyder plugins locally and remotely, as needed for the new remote development functionality among others.
+In addition, he tested and validated the installers' update process, as well as finding and reporting several bugs on Windows.
+
+Daniel also reviewed and assisted with [Angela Remolina](https://github.com/AngelaRemolina)'s work on major improvements to Spyder's File/Symbol Switcher.
+Angela, an intern who worked for on Spyder over several months, migrated the File/symbol switcher to a plugin, so it is modular and accessible to other plugins.
+As part of her project he helped manage, she also added lightning-fast, [ripgrep](https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep)-accelerated searching of all files in the current project.
+
+Finally, along with [Juan-Sebastian Bautista](https://github.com/jsbautista) whom he has mentored and managed, Daniel performed an in-depth review of the numerous UI/UX enhancements included in Spyder 6.
+This work has made Spyder much easier and more intuitive to use, including for users with accessibility needs and with translated versions.
+Thanks to Daniel's mentorship, Juan-Sebastian looks to continue his work with Spyder into the future.<br><br>
+
+
+![Spyder release page, showing a list of version numbers and their corresponding information and files](daniel-release-page.png "Daniel has released dozens of recent Spyder versions")
+
+## Spyder release management
+
+Since February 1, 2023, thanks to the CZI EOSS 5 grant funding, Daniel has also been active as Spyder's Release Manager, taking on the substantial task of handling the many critical steps required to produce stable packages for the many platforms we support, including:
+
+* [PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/spyder/) (pip)
+* [Conda-Forge](https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/spyder) (Conda)
+* [Spyder installers](https://www.spyder-ide.org/download/), and the
+* [GitHub releases](https://github.com/spyder-ide/spyder/releases).
+
+Since then, he has served as Release Manager for one minor and eight bugfix releases for Spyder 5 (from 5.4.3 to 5.5.6), and eight pre-releases, one major release and three bugfix releases for Spyder 6 (from 6.0 alpha2 to 6.0.3).
+Without his work, our users wouldn't have been able to benefit from all the testing and stable releases that we have, especially for Spyder 6!
+
+
+## What's next?
+
+In the immediate future, Daniel will continue his critical role as the Release Manager for Spyder, ensuring users continue to see regular stable updates for Spyder 6.
+Additionally, he'll further his partnership with Juan-Sebastian, this time focused on maintaining Spyder 6 and fixing any further bugs that are found.
+He'll also work on further improving [Jupyter QtConsole](https://qtconsole.readthedocs.io/en/stable/), the frontend that Spyder (in the IPython Console) and other users and applications employ to provide a rich, interactive graphical interface to local and remote kernels.
+Finally, he'll help implement the frontend interface to remote file systems added as part of our remote development work, allowing users to manipulate remote files just like those locally!
+
+We're looking forward to seeing the fruits of all that work, and as always, happy Spydering!🕸️