What happened

In late 2025 I was included in the OpenUK Honours List 2026. The list is published by OpenUK and recognises people contributing to open source and open standards in the UK. The official list is available at https://openuk.uk/honours/.

Why it matters

Public recognitions like this help highlight the value of long-term, community-focused contributions. Open-source work is often collaborative, incremental, and sometimes invisible; recognitions bring attention to the maintenance, documentation, and community work that keeps projects useful and sustainable.

Lessons for engineers

  1. Documentation matters: clear READMEs and contribution guides make it easier for others to join and maintain projects.
  2. Maintainability wins: small, testable parts with clear ownership survive longer than large, ill-documented features.
  3. Support your users: prompt issue triage and helpful responses grow project trust and adoption.
  4. Consistency beats perfection: regular, steady improvements compound into real impact.
  5. Share credit: acknowledge contributors and make pathways for new maintainers.

What I’ll do next

  • Improve documentation across my active projects and add contribution templates.
  • Prioritise triage windows so community issues get quick, courteous attention.
  • Mentor one new contributor per quarter to expand the contributor base.

These are my views; any similarities are coincidental.