We are pleased to announce that the Phil Bagwell Memorial Scala Community Award for 2018 has been awarded to Kenji Yoshida. The award was presented in Lausanne at the outset of Scala Days 2019.
On stage, Eugene Yokota accepted the award on Yoshida-san’s behalf. You can watch the ceremony here. (The ceremony also included the 2019 award to Kelley Robinson.)
And here is a tribute video with remarks from Josh Suereth, Eugene Yokota, Rob Norris, and Miles Sabin.
About the winner
Yoshida-san is known to Scala users as:
- Long-term maintainer of scalaz, the first library to pioneer full support for pure-functional programming in Scala.
- Prominent contributor to Scala 2.13. His many pull requests to the Scala repo were done while he was on parental leave in 2018.
- A ubiquitous presence in pull request queues across the Scala open-source world, in literally hundreds of projects. Taken individually, his contributions are often small, but in aggregate, they are essential to our ecosystem’s health.
Some of Yoshida-san’s Japanese-language tweets are available in English translation at @not_xuwei_k.
About the award
The Bagwell Award is named in honor of Phil Bagwell, who passed away in 2012. In a 2012 blog post, Martin Odersky remembers Phil and his special place in the Scala community.
The Award Committee consists of previous Award winners (see below). They took community nominations into consideration.
Past winners of the award:
- 2017: Josh Suereth
- 2016: Erik Osheim
- 2015: Bill Venners
- 2014: Lalit Pant
- 2013: Dick Wall