GitHub Honors Standout Contributors at Universe 2023
GitHub has announced the winners of the GitHub Awards, recognizing individuals, projects, and organizations that have made a significant positive impact on the developer community this year. The awards were presented at GitHub Universe 2023 and span open source, education, and enterprise categories.
Open Source: Community and Innovation
Wonderfully Welcoming Award: Python Software Foundation
The Python Software Foundation (PSF) earns this award for its commitment to inclusivity and diversity. Through initiatives such as PyCon US Charlas, the organization lowers language barriers for Spanish-speaking contributors, while its support of PyLadiesCon advances gender diversity in the community. A robust Code of Conduct, alongside accessibility features like captioning and a focus on health and safety, underscores the foundation's dedication to the people behind the code.
Global Grandiose Award: Storybook
Storybook, a frontend workshop for building UI components and pages, is recognized for its vast international contributor base. The project serves thousands of teams for UI development, testing, and documentationâincluding GitHub's own Primer design languageâwith more than 1,700 contributors representing over 85 countries.
Hardware Hacker Award: Limor "Ladyada" Fried
Limor "Ladyada" Fried, lead engineer and owner of Adafruit Industries, takes home the Hardware Hacker Award. Adafruit, an open source hardware company with nearly 100 employees and a 50,000-square-foot factory in New York, provides a hub for makers of all skill levels. The community's hardware applications range from new business ventures and space exploration to special effects and assistive technologies.
Noteworthy Newcomer Award: LangChain
LangChain is a framework for building applications powered by language models. Though its Python package was released just a year ago, it has already garnered over 65,000 stargazers, been used by more than 33,000 projects, and attracted a community of over 1,700 contributors.
Supply Chain Sentinel Award: Alexander Brandes
Alexander Brandes, a Jenkins governance board member, core maintainer, and release team member, is honored for his contributions to security. In his spare time, Brandes focuses on UI/UX components and has made more than 500 high-quality contributions to GitHub's Advisory Database, providing accurate and actionable information about known vulnerabilities that help secure the open source supply chain.
Audience Choice Award: Astro
Astro, a modern static site generator, was voted by developers as the project that best helped them create impact. By intelligently loading only the necessary JavaScript, Astro lets developers build fast, interactive websites, reducing the complexity common in modern web frameworks.
Education: Mentorship and Opportunity
Lighthouse Award: Jaisal Patel
Jaisal Patel is one of GitHub Education's top contributors in GitHub Discussions, recognized for his responsiveness in areas like GitHub Pages and general GitHub guidance. In the past month alone, Patel provided more than 19 solved answers, helping guide fellow learners in their open source journeys.
Empowering Educator Award: Catherine Leung
Catherine Leung is recognized for her willingness to experiment and problem-solve in open source projects as both a maintainer and contributor. She goes a step further by sharing public notes on GitHub Classroom setup and serves as an enthusiastically supportive member of the community.
Phenomenal Education Partner Award: Appwrite
Appwrite has been a foundational partner in GitHub Education programs, driven by a strong mission to hire students and provide remote internship experiences. The organization has hired the most Octerns to date and uses GitHub Discussions effectively to communicate with and support students.
Customers: Enterprise Leadership and Impact
OSPO Leadership Award: Mercedes Benz
Mercedes Benz is leading the automotive sector in open source adoption, driven by its publicly backed FOSS Manifesto. The company has replaced siloed engineering with open source development methodologies internally, while externally demonstrating commitment by sponsoring dozens of GitHub projects and foundations like InnerSource Commons.
DevOps Champion Award: Katie Peters
Katie Peters, a staff developer at TELUS, has transformed how the company approaches software development, ensuring developers find focus and flow in their work. Peters shares her strategic vision through a published customer story, video, and a Universe session, helping other organizations tackle similar challenges. She has also raised the profile of other developers at TELUS to contribute their insights to the greater GitHub community.
GitHub for Good Award: Ersilia
Ersilia, a tech nonprofit, equips universities, hospitals, and laboratories in low-resourced countries with data science tools for research on infectious and neglected diseases. This year, the organization developed a free, open source repository of AI/ML models for drug discovery, helping researchers identify drug candidates, design molecules, and anticipate adverse side effects. Ersilia welcomes volunteers across diverse fields, from software development to marketing, to support its mission.
GitHub Stars Awards
A handful of developers stand out among the millions on GitHub for their extraordinary work in helping others. The GitHub Stars program gives these individuals a platform to share their work, reach broader audiences, and shape the future of GitHub. Every year, GitHub hosts an exclusive event where Stars and product teams collaborate on deep technical discussions, explore GitHub's vision, and learn from one another. The event wraps up with the GitHub Stars Awards, which celebrates those who have gone above and beyond.
Star of the Year
Emanuele Bartolesi (@kasuken) works as a software architect by day and fills every other hour with speaking, blogging, teaching, and live coding. He has reached millions through virtual and in-person meetups and conferences, sharing his expertise on GitHub and his passion for tech and open source. His learning-in-public efforts span Twitch, Dev.to, and a Learning GitHub course on LinkedIn that has attracted thousands of new learners. He regularly speaks at meetups in Zurich and at events with hundreds of attendees worldwide.
The GitHub Star of the Year Award honors the Star who has made a huge impact on the developer communityâwhether by growing communities from scratch, helping newcomers into open source, or being exceptionally welcoming and supportive.
Top Teacher
Barbara Forbes (@Ba4bes) is a technical lead in the Netherlands focused on DevOps and automation. She teaches in an accessible way through multiple channels, from blog posts on GitHub Actions and GitHub Codespaces to co-organizing local user groups. Beyond developer technologies, she helps others improve skills like delivering tech talks. She has also driven Git education, launching Git Essentials Training on LinkedIn and giving talks on getting started with Git.
The Top Teacher Award recognizes the Star who excels at educating, inspiring, and helping everyone grow and nurturing communities.
Community Growth
Miguel Ăngel DurĂĄn GarcĂa (@midudev) is based in Spain, but his influence spans the globe. A content creator centered on web technologies, he shares his work through his Twitch and YouTube channels. This year he pushed boundaries by creating virtual events and hackathons that brought thousands of developers together to learn and exchange content.
The Community Growth Award recognizes the Star who grows and nurtures the communities around themâwhether an OSS project or a developer communityâand brings people together.
Open Source Advocacy
Ruth Ikegah (@Ruth-ikegah) has championed open source for years, but this year broke new ground for OSS in Africa and for women in tech. She mentors at the Codacy Pioneers Fellowship, sits on the Board of Directors of the CHAOSS Project, and led the first CHAOSScon Africa event and the Open Source Festival 2023 in Lagos. Beyond OSS advocacy, she regularly speaks to help women in tech, talks about OSS at universities, and guides students onto a clear path forward. She also shares GitHub knowledge on Codespaces and Copilot at events. Ikegah is dedicated to showing people how to start in OSS, through her GitHub ReadMe Story and a ReadMe Guide on making your first OSS contribution in four easy steps.
The Open Source Advocacy Award recognizes the Star who has helped users get started in open source and built up communities around it.
Congratulations to all the award winners. Nominations were based on community activity on GitHub for projects and the impact of individuals' contributions. Winners from those nominations were chosen by an internal committee at GitHub, with prizes sponsored by Logitech MX Master Series, providing the ultimate performance kit designed for coders.
