The PSF Gave Us a Community Service Award, and We Barely Talked About It

Last year, a friend from the Python community pointed out that Matt and I had never really talked about receiving the Python Software Foundation Community Service Award.

There was no blog post, no big announcement, and barely even a mention, apart from a LinkedIn post Matt shared much later.

They were right. It was a meaningful recognition, and it deserved to be said out loud. So, a year later, I finally decided to write about it.

The Email We Did Not Expect #

It started with an email from Deb Nicholson, Executive Director of the Python Software Foundation, in April 2025. She let us know that the PSF had awarded the 2025 Q1 Community Service Award to Matt and me “for building, growing and sustaining the Python community in the Philippines, including through organising conferences, meetups, and volunteer training programs.”

The email came just before our post-conference Volunteer Thanksgiving Party for PyCon APAC 2025. We shared the news with Kaizend, our core volunteer group, but we did not want to make it the focus of the event. That afternoon was meant to celebrate them, not us.

Rodney Lei Estrada, one of the PyCon APAC 2025 chairs, ended up announcing it anyway. So much for keeping it low-key—but thank you, Lei.

Someone quietly nominated us for the award without asking for any credit. A lot of the good work in this community happens that way. So, thank you. You know who you are.

The email genuinely caught us off guard, in the best possible way. It was the kind of news that took a few moments to fully register.

What the Award Meant to Us #

For more than a decade, Matt and I had helped build Python Philippines (PythonPH)—organizing events, mentoring volunteers, supporting new leaders, and figuring things out as we went. We never expected an award for any of it.

Over time, the work became less about organizing everything ourselves and more about building the systems, culture, and support that allowed other people to step up and lead. Kaizend became an important part of that. It was not just our core volunteer group, but a space where people learned by doing, took on real responsibility, and grew into organizers and community leaders. Some of them now run PythonPH themselves — sitting on the board or taking on director roles.

That was why the recognition meant so much. It felt personal, but it also felt like recognition of what we had started with our fellow co-founders, from whom we learned so much, and what generations of volunteers later sustained by believing in the mission and continuing to carry the work forward.

The award recognized not only the conferences, meetups, and programs we had organized, but also the work of helping keep the community alive, evolving, and capable of growing beyond us.

PythonPH has brought some of the kindest and most well-intentioned people into our lives. It’s also given us a way to support others and create opportunities, even without being particularly wealthy. As I joked at the time, it sometimes made us feel like mini-philanthropists, just without the money. Lol.

We were also deeply grateful for the cash award, the PyCon US 2026 ticket, and the travel support. The generosity behind it made the recognition feel even more special.

We Would Have Done It Anyway, but Recognition Made the Journey Sweeter #

Leading an open-source community can be tiring and uncertain, and there are plenty of days when you are simply focused on solving one problem after another, with hardly any breathing room in between.

If Matt and I are being honest, building those foundations required an unsustainable amount of effort from us at times. Most days, it still felt like we were only halfway there. But it was a genuinely interesting problem to keep solving, especially with so many enthusiastic people around us. The feeling of building something bigger than ourselves, something future leaders could continue building on, was priceless.

This recognition does not erase those moments, but it gives us a reason to pause, appreciate how far we’ve come, and remember why we started—and why we kept going.

We would have done it anyway. But being recognized for it made the journey feel a little sweeter.

P.S. A year after the award was announced, we finally received the physical trophies in person at PyCon Singapore 2026. That became another meaningful moment of its own, and I’ll write about it separately.