Ten years ago today, on December 23, 2009, Mopidy was born. While chatting with my friend and then-colleague Johannes Knutsen, we came up with the idea of building an MPD server that could play music from Spotify instead of local files.

This is the story of the first decade of Mopidy.

The pathlib module was added to the standard library in Python 3.4 and is one of the many nice improvements that Python 3 has gained over the past decade. In three weeks, Python 3.5 will be the oldest version of Python that still receives security patches. This means that the presence of pathlib can soon be taken for granted on all Python installations, and the quest towards replacing os.path can begin for real.

In this post, I’ll have a look at how pathlib can be used to handle file paths containing arbitrary bytes, as this is valid on most file systems.

I’ve finally released Pykka 2.0, the first major update to Pykka in almost six years.

Pykka is a Python implementation of the actor model. The actor model introduces some simple rules to control the sharing of state and cooperation between execution units, which makes it easier to build concurrent applications.

Pykka 2.0 is a major release because it is backwards incompatible in several minor ways. However, the backwards incompatible changes should only affect quite narrow use cases. Mopidy and its extensions, which is the largest open source ecosystem I know of that uses Pykka, runs unmodified on Pykka 2.0.

In this blog post I’ll go through some of the more important improvements in 2.0.

I’ve released Mopidy-MPRIS 2.0, the first major update to Mopidy-MPRIS in about 3.5 years.

Mopidy-MPRIS is a Mopidy extension that makes Mopidy controllable from other programs on the same machine through D-Bus. This makes it possible to control Mopidy from various widgets in GNOME/KDE/etc, as well as with keyboard media keys.

Yesterday, I released v1.0.0 of the Mopidy.js JavaScript library. Even though the library serves as the basis for most Mopidy web clients and has been in active use since 2013, this was the first release in almost four years.

Four years is quite a long time in the world of JavaScript.