The PSSI is both happy and proud to announce Vijay Kumar as the winner of this year's Kenneth Gonsalves Award.

Vijay works as an embedded software developer & trainer at Zilogic Systems. Apart from developing Python based embedded systems based on Telit and Embedded Linux there, he also contributes to the development of in-house Python based build and test automation frameworks. To add to that, he trains people in Embedded Linux and device driver development as well.

Vijay's community building activities and involvement goes back more than a decade! He helped create the GNU/Linux User Group of Trichy, back in 2001, when he was an undergrad at NIT Trichy. Since then, he has been promoting Free and Open Source Software, by helping organize meetups, workshops, demo days, and conferences. He got associated with Chennaipy in 2010, and in mid-2011 helped coordinate its activities. For the past 1.5 years, Chennaipy has been put in overdrive mode, rapidly expanding in quality of the meetups, and the diversity of the people attending it.

During his spare time, apart from being a backbone of building the FOSS and Python community in India, he contributes to a myriad of open source projects. To list a few:

• He has contributed to porting U-Boot and the Linux Kernel to the IPQ806x platform, a Qualcomm Snapdragon variant.
• Patch contributions to Qemu, and the Linux Testing Project.
• Also maintains the Free Software tutorials "Embedded Programming with the GNU Toolchain" and "GTK+ Multi-line Text Editing Widget.".

It is a proud moment indeed when you're recognized for all those years of passionate work that you did for the betterment of everyone around you. Our heartfelt congratulations to Vijay Kumar, and we wish him all success and a bright future ahead. We hope the younger generation takes inspiration from his works and contribute more to improve the Free Software and Python programming community.