Jesse Noller (2012)

Jesse has been a core contributor to CPython since 2008, focusing his development efforts on the multiprocessing module. However, much of his Python contribution over the years has occurred outside of the development team. After being elected to the PSF in 2009, he was elected to the Board of Directors in 2010. After two years leading PyCon's Program Committee, Jesse became the conference's Chairman in 2012 and put together the largest and most successful conference to date.

Jesse has also helped spawn the Python Sprints project, Python Core mentorship project, created the Outreach and Education committee, is driving the revamp of the Python.org site and infrastructure, and is involved in other community projects. His primary focus is the Python community's outreach, growth, and long term success.

The video announcing Jesse's award at OSCON 2012 is available on YouTube.

Jesse is a Principal Software Engineer at Nasuni where he leads the development of the management and user interfaces for Nasuni's Filer product. At Nasuni he uses Python everywhere, from the core of the product up through the interfaces, tools, and testing.

When he's not working on Python, PyCon, or other PSF projects, he partakes in fitness activities and spends time with his wife Dusty and their two beautiful daughters.

Georg Brandl (2011)

Georg has been a core contributor to CPython since 2005, contributing bug fixes for compiler internals and modules such as pdb. His most widely known contributions are to Python's documentation, through writing as well as by creating and maintaining the Sphinx tool chain for converting reStructuredText input files to more easily consumed formats such as HTML and PDF.

The video announcing Georg's award at OSCON 2011 is available on YouTube.

Georg is a PhD student of Physics. He works at the Munich research reactor slash neutron source on magnetism, researching novel materials for the computing of tomorrow. He uses Python to control experiments consisting of dozens of individual devices, and for teaching other scientists how to do so efficiently.

When he is not working on Python-related projects, Georg likes to cycle and to cook.

Christian Tismer (2010)

Christian Tismer's contributions to the technology behind Python have focused on performance. For example, he is the founder of the Stackless Python project, a micro-threading system with the first implementation of generators and continuations. You can learn more about Stackless from the project's history page and this IBM developerWorks interview with Christian by David Mertz.

Christian also co-founded PyPy, an implementation of Python in Python, with Armin Rigo and Holger Krekel. Christian worked on PyPy full time for a period, using EU funding. Later, he worked on the JIT compiler Psyco with Raymond Hettinger to create Psyco V2. Most recently, he has been employed by CCP Games to work on combining Stackless and Psyco and updating them to support 64-bit systems.

In 1997, as one of his earliest contributions to the Python community, Christian launched the Starship Python website…

When he's not working on Python, Christian enjoys watching movies, reading, and playing piano. You can follow him on twitter @ctismer.”

Mark Hammond (2009)

Mark Hammond, author and long-term maintainer of the pywin32 package and PythonWin, has been a long-term contributor to Python. Without his contributions it is likely that the Windows platform would be a much less significant part of the Python landscape.

Mark created software that made Python immeasurably more valuable to the Windows community, thereby ensuring that Python was not consigned to the "Linux/UNIX open source" category. He also created the first implementation of Python for Microsoft's .NET environment, was a major contributor to ActiveState's place in the Python world, and has more recently acted as Python ambassador to the Mozilla community.

Mark is also (jointly with Andy Robinson) the author of an O'Reilly title, Python Programming on Win-32.

Martin von Löwis (2008)

Martin von Löwis continues to be a tireless worker on behalf of the Python community. He has been a long-term contributor to the Python core, and regularly answers questions on the Python developers' and users' mailing lists. A PSF director since 2002, he was also the prime mover in transitioning the Python development infrastructure from SourceForge, and has created several Roundup issue trackers for various areas. He chaired the PSF Grants Committee, which among other achievements kept Jython alive when its future looked uncertain.

• Martin's homepage

Alex Martelli (2006)

Prolific writer and community member Alex Martelli was selected as the recipient of the 2006 Frank Willison Award. Alex's books include Python in a Nutshell and the Python Cookbook (editor). Alex has written a brief biography relating his Journey to Python.

• O'Reilly press release
• O'Reilly blog article
• Alex Martelli's homepage
• Wikipedia article on Alex Martelli
• Interview with Alex about Python

Fredrik Lundh (2003)

Fredrik Lundh is well known by his nickname "effbot", so named because of his prolific contributions to the comp.lang.python newsgroup over the years. They became so numerous, in fact, that they became the basis for his book, (the eff-bot guide to) The Python Standard Library. Fredrik is also the author of or major contributor to the PIL, SRE, xmlrpc, Tkinter and Unicode Python packages, among others. Fredrik is a principal of Secret Labs AB.

• Fredrik's article about the award
• O'Reilly press release
• Fredrik's homepage

Andrew Kuchling (2002)

Andrew is a prolific programmer and the author of many articles, including the extensive "What's New in Python" series, published for each version of Python since 2.0. Since receiving the Frank Willison Award, Andrew has served on the PSF Board of Directors and he co-chaired the 2006 & 2007 PyCon community conferences in Dallas, Texas. Andrew is now operating a consulting firm, Green Dragonfly LLC.

• Andrew's article about the award
• O'Reilly press release
• Andrew's homepage