... and hopefully help yourself with current programming projects, too.

Some recent programming activities left me underwhelmed by a few of the standard library's included batteries. This has already led to a significant revamp of the subprocess module documentation to steer new users away from the Popen Swiss army knife (unless they really need it) and to explain the commonly needed parameters more clearly. It still needs work (the notes and warnings are far too repetitive), but it at least introduces things in the right order now (high level convenience API that most people want first, lower level Popen API that some people need second).

However, for 3.3 I'd like to improve things even more in at least three areas: invocation of the system shell for administration tasks, better tools for traversing filesystem directories and programmatic management of deterministic resource cleanup (i.e. not relying on the garbage collector).

Accordingly, I have 3 projects up on PyPI (with docs on ReadTheDocs and source control and issue tracking on BitBucket):

• WalkDir: os.walk() style iterators with file and directory filtering (both inclusion and exclusion), depth limiting and symlink loop detection, as well as convenience iterators to flatten os.walk() style iterators into a series of paths (either all walked paths, just the directories or just the files). I currently plan to make (at least some of) these part of the shutil module, but exactly what gets added will be based on the feedback I receive on this module and its API design.
• Shell Command: Convenience APIs that combine subprocess invocation with string interpolation. Interpolated strings are escaped with shlex.quote() by default, with a custom conversion specifier ("!u", for unquoted) used to invoke the standard interpolation process. It also features an experimental API where I'm tinkering with the use of select.select() on subprocess pipes (I'm not sure it achieves a lot over simple blocking IO in its current form, though). The current plan for this API is that it will be added directly to the subprocess module (well, the stable and sensible parts will be, anyway - I still have my doubts about the select.select() experiment)
• contextlib2: This module basically exists to let me publish and gather feedback on ContextStack, a proposed addition to contextlib for 3.3 that should make it easier to manage deterministic resource cleanup programmatically (i.e. without coupling it as directly to code layout as simple with statements do).