Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial Prize

I am honored and thrilled to receive the Malcolm Tredinnick award this year! Thank you to the DSF Board for selecting me. It means so much to me as a person who has gone from wanting to be a part of the community to wanting to help it grow to being able to help it grow. It’s pretty dang cool to see several people who I’ve interacted with nominate me with truly heart-touching statements. I am deeply appreciative of you all and this recognition.

As a part of the Django generation that never met Malcolm (I’d say why, but a lot of people would complain about feeling old), I’ve only gotten to learn about him through content.

Malcolm clearly moved the community forward; I loved the ending of his talk “Code Writing and Design” of “Always contribute! Best beats perfect”. He was obviously friendly. He had a great sense of humor. He never stopped being a teacher and he had a brilliant mind.

I’m tremendously grateful for his legacy, both in terms of the framework itself and the community. The ORM continues to be one of the strongest components of Django and autoescaping in templates has set the bar for developer experience in the project. The community has always striven to be welcoming, evidenced by the countless people who continue to volunteer their time to nurture it.

Lastly, thank you to everyone who has written about Malcolm and shared your stories. I appreciate having the opportunity to learn through you.

• Django blog post, “Goodbye Malcolm”
• Daniel Lindsley, “In Memory of Malcolm”
• Adrian Holovaty, “Remembering Malcolm Tredinnick”
• Mary, “Remembering Malcolm Tredinnick”
• Barbara Shaurette, “Farewell, Malcolm”

Perhaps Barabara said it best:

In the meantime, I encourage everyone to honor Malcolm’s memory by following his example.

Submit that patch for a Django ORM ticket that you’ve been putting off for a while.

Go into #django and help some new users.

Answer questions. Be nice.

Teach people. Help them, nurture them.