Brandon (@btp.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy)

Developer of the year Developers Day is a recent annual Swedish gala organized by the Stockholm-based company Developers Bay. This is its third year running. They have an ambition to highlight and celebrate Swedish software _developers_ (or perhaps it is developers based in Sweden?) and hand out a series of awards for that purpose. A jury that consists of six persons receives nominations through-out the year and then they decide which of them who get awards in six different categories. ## Awarded This year, I was graciously nominated as, and subsequently, awarded _Developer of the year_ at the award gala on September 12, 2025. Developer of the Year 2025 “certificate”, in Swedish The motivation, as shown in Swedish in the image above, translates into something like: > This year’s winner is a developer with a lifelong passion for technology and problem solving. His interest was awaken already in the 1980s with a commodore64 and has since grown into a career characterized by curiosity and drive. After starting his professional life at IBM, the developer has contributed to the open source world for a long time – both as a coder and as an ambassador for open collaboration. For this year’s winner, development is also a way to understand people and the most challenging part of technology is the collaboration between them. He created curl, one of the world’s most installed software products, with over 20 billion installations. Getting recognition for my work and many years in software development is truly awesome and heartwarming. It energizes me and motivates me to go further. Clearly I must be doing something right! I aspire to make top quality software entirely free and Open Source. I want to provided stellar tools and means for my fellow developers that make them productive and allow them to build awesome things. I try to explain what I do, how things work and I how I think things should be done, to perhaps in some small ways push things in the world in the appropriate direction. ## The award Yeah, this is probably a little navel-gazing and inside baseball, as this is just a (small) company and its associated network that give out awards within a relatively small Swedish community by jury members who given their public bios do not have a terribly long or extensive experience out in the big wide world. _of the year?_ Yeah a quite legitimate question could be what special action or activity I have done in 2025 to earn the honor this particular time and not last year or next, but I think it simply boils down to the fact that someone nominated me this year. Best developer? Comparing different persons working with completely different things in completely different areas and saying that one of them is “best” is certainly futile and of course not actually possible. We have numerous excellent developers in Sweden. In spite of that, getting recognition in the form of an award is simply wonderful. Thank you! https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/09/13/developer-of-the-year/