The GitHub Awards celebrates the outstanding contributions and achievements in the developer community by honoring individuals, projects, and organizations for creating an outsized positive impact on the community.
We announced the award winners at GitHub Universe 2023, but here’s a recap for those that missed it!
Open Source Awards
Wonderfully Welcoming Award
Python Software Foundation (@psf) is not just a hub for Python development; it’s a community that embraces diversity and inclusion at its core. Through initiatives like PyCon US Charlas, PSF breaks language barriers, providing a platform for Spanish-speaking contributors. It also champions gender diversity by backing the pioneering PyLadiesCon.
Above all, the PSF is committed to a respectful and safe community experience, fortified by a strong Code of Conduct. It also extends accessibility through captioning and is vigilant about health and safety measures. At PSF, it’s not just about code; it’s about the people behind it.
The Wonderfully Welcoming Award recognizes people or projects that have been the most welcoming and seen an increasing amount of contributors.
Global Grandiose Award
Storybook is a frontend workshop for building UI components and pages. Thousands of teams use it for UI development, testing, and documentation, including GitHub’s own open source design language—Primer! 1.7k+ contributors from across 85+ countries have contributed to Storybook!
The Global Grandiose Award recognizes projects that have a large global community of contributors.
Hardware Hacker Award
Limor “Ladyada” Fried (@LadyADA) is the lead engineer and owner of Adafruit Industries, an open source hardware company that’s an online destination for makers of all ages and skill levels to learn electronics and design products. Adafruit has almost 100 people on staff, a 50,000-square-foot factory in New York, and whose hardware is being used by the community for everything from starting a business, supporting space exploration, making special effects, building assistive technologies, and more!
The Hardware Hacker Award recognizes people or projects contributing to making hardware accessible through open specs/software.
Noteworthy Newcomer Award
LangChain is a framework for developing applications powered by language models. LangChain’s Python package, which was released a year ago, already has 65k+ stargazers, is used by 33k+ projects, and has a community of 1.7k+ contributors.
The Noteworthy Newcomer Award recognizes people or projects that are creating and sharing breakthrough contributions/projects.
Supply Chain Sentinel Award
Alexander Brandes (@notmyfault) is a Jenkins governance board member, core maintainer and release team member. In his spare time, he focuses on contributing to UI/UX components. With his prolific (more than 500) and exceptionally high-quality contributions to our GitHub Advisory Database, he consistently provides accurate and actionable information about known vulnerabilities, making the open source supply chain safer for everyone.
The Supply Chain Sentinel Award recognizes a community member who has contributed to make the software supply chain more secure, by finding, disclosing, or fixing security vulnerabilities in open source projects or in supply chain tooling, or by providing information on known vulnerabilities to the ecosystem.
Audience Choice Award
Astro is a modern, open source static site generator that offers the best of both static and dynamic website development. It empowers web developers to create exceptionally fast and interactive websites by intelligently loading only the necessary JavaScript. Astro is designed to simplify web development and reduce the complexity often associated with modern web frameworks.
The Audience Choice Award recognizes a project that has been voted by developers as a project that has helped them create an impact.
Education Awards
Lighthouse Award
Jaisal Patel (@GhostOf0days) is one of GitHub Education’s top contributors within GitHub Discussions not only in the education category but across the community. Jaisal often provides help with GitHub Pages, general GitHub know-how and is very responsive to members, with the past month alone providing more than 19 solved answers!
The Lighthouse Award recognizes students who lead fellow learners by shining a light to their communities through open source.
Empowering Educator Award
Catherine Leung (@catherine-leung) is not afraid to experiment and problem solve within open source projects, either as a maintainer or a contributor, sharing experiences with many peers. Catherine also provides public notes on how to set up GitHub Classroom and is an enthusiastically supportive community member.
The Empowering Education Award recognizes educators and teachers who provide support and answers to fellow members of their communities.
Phenomenal Education Partner Award
Appwrite has been a foundational partner within the GitHub Education Externships and Octernships programs with a strong mission driven to hire students and provide them great remote internship experiences. They have hired the most Octerns to date and have used GitHub Discussions in fantastic ways to communicate with students.
The Phenomenal Education Partner Award recognizes GitHub Education partners that provide strong support and opportunities for students, teachers, and schools.
Customer Awards
OSPO Leadership Award
Mercedes Benz has been leading the automotive sector in embracing open source software as a powerful accelerator for their digital transformation. This started at the top with the publishing and executive backing of their FOSS Manifesto that has permeated the entire organization. Internally, this means using open source development methodologies and tools instead of siloed engineering; externally they have demonstrated commitment financially by sponsoring dozens of projects on GitHub, along with foundations like InnerSource Commons.
The OSPO Leadership Award recognizes Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) who have demonstrated that it’s not only possible to innovate in the enterprise by focusing on open source, it’s essential. By separating out and addressing the real business risks and organizational challenges from FUD and inertia, successful OSPOs are blazing a trail for the industry as a whole to use, contribute to, and publish open source software.
DevOps Champion Award
Katie Peters is a brilliant technologist and staff developer at TELUS, where she ensures developers find focus and flow in their day-to-day work so they can focus on their mission of keeping Canadians connected. With her clear vision of developer empowerment, Katie has transformed the way TELUS approaches software development. At the same time, Katie is a highly influential and well-respected champion for GitHub. Katie’s strategic thought leadership through her customer story, video, and upcoming Universe session, is pivotal in helping members of the developer community solve similar challenges within their own organizations. Shepherding in the next generation of influential developer leaders, Katie has also raised the profile of other bright developers at TELUS to share their insights to GitHub’s developer community.
The DevOps Champion Award award recognizes GitHub’s brightest customer champions who have shared their best-in-class stories and thought leadership spotlighting how they have transformed their developer organizations, enabling our community to learn from their insights and apply these learnings back to their own GitHub journey.
GitHub for Good Award
Ersilia is a tech nonprofit organization that equips universities, hospitals, and laboratories in low-resourced countries with data science tools for infectious and neglected disease research. This year, the organization developed a free, open-source repository of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) models for drug discovery. These models aim to help researchers identify drug candidates for orphan and neglected diseases, design molecules de novo, understand mechanisms of action, and anticipate adverse side effects, ultimately helping to support the global south. Do you want to contribute to Ersilia’s mission and vision? The organization welcomes volunteers in different fields, from software development to marketing and communications. Check out their repository to learn more.
The GitHub for Good Award recognizes a nonprofit or social sector organization who has leveraged GitHub for good to empower developers to make a positive difference in the world.
GitHub Stars Awards
Out of millions of developers on GitHub, there are a select few who go above and beyond in helping others in the developer space. The GitHub Stars program recognizes and lifts up those select few and gives them a platform to showcase their work, reaching more people and shaping the future of GitHub.They help educate, inspire, and influence the communities in which they live and work. Each year, we host an exclusive event bringing the GitHub Stars and the GitHub product teams closer together to dive deep into GitHub features, have in-depth technical discussions, see GitHub’s vision, and share and learn from each other. The event concludes with the announcement of the GitHub Stars Awards—recognizing those who’ve gone above and beyond.
Star of the Year Award
Emanuele Bartolesi (@kasuken) is a software architect by day, and a speaker-blogger-teacher-live coder by all other hours. Emanuele has been reaching millions of people by sharing his GitHub knowledge and expertise through virtual and in-person meetups and conferences, and sharing his love for technology and open source through learning in public on Twitch, Dev.to and launching a Learning GitHub course on LinkedIn that has had thousands of new learners. In addition, Emanuele regularly speaks at meetups in Zurich, as well as at events with hundreds of people all over the world.
The GitHub Star of the Year Award recognizes the GitHub Star that has made a huge impact to the developer community—from growing developer communities from the ground up, helping users get started in open source, and being incredibly welcoming and supporting the community.
Top Teacher Award
Barbara Forbes (@Ba4bes) a technical lead in the Netherlands who focuses on DevOps and automation, and loves to teach in an approachable way through multiple ways to reach and connect with people—from writing blog posts on GitHub Actions and GitHub Codespaces to co-organizing local user groups. Not only does Barbara focus on developer technologies but also helps others to skill up like how to give great tech talks. Barbara has also been focusing on helping others skill up on Git from launching the Git Essentials Training on LinkedIn to giving talks on how to get started using Git.
The Top Teacher Award recognizes the Star who thrives on educating, inspiring, and helping everyone grow and nurturing communities.
Miguel Ángel Durán García (@midudev) is based in Spain, but his reach is far across the globe. Miguel is a content creator focusing on web technologies, and shares his content through his Twitch and YouTube channels. This year Miguel has pushed boundaries by creating virtual events and hackathons bringing thousands of developers together to learn and share content with each other.
The Community Growth Award recognizes the GitHub Star who grows and nurtures communities around them, whether it’s an OSS project or a developer community, and brings everyone together.
Open Source Advocacy Award
Ruth Ikegah (@Ruth-ikegah) has been advocating open source over the past few years, but this year has really pushed the boundaries with OSS in Africa and women in tech. Ruth is a pioneer mentor at the Codacy Pioneers Fellowship, on the board of Directors of the CHAOSS Project, has led the first CHAOSScon Africa event and the Open Source Festival 2023 in Lagos. Not only is Ruth an OSS advocate but a dedicated speaker in helping women in tech and speaking about OSS at universities and setting a path for students. Ruth also shares her GitHub knowledge on GitHub Codespaces and GitHub Copilot at events. Ruth is dedicated to sharing how people can get started in OSS, through her GitHub ReadMe Story and GitHub ReadMe Guide on making your first OSS contribution in foureasy steps.
The Open Source Advocacy Award recognizes the GitHub Star that has helped users get started and built up communities using open source.
Please join us in congratulating all of our award winners!
Nominations for the GitHub Awards were selected based on community activity on GitHub for projects, and the impact of contributions for individuals. Winners from among these nominations were selected by an internal committee at GitHub and the award prizes were kindly sponsored by Logitech MX Master Series who provided winners with the ultimate performance kit, designed for coders.
Lee Reilly 
