This year, the Zephyr Project marks ten years as an open source project. What began as a small real-time operating system has grown into one of the most active and widely adopted open source projects in embedded systems. It runs on thousands of boards and is supported by a global community of contributors, maintainers and companies.
Milestones like this don’t happen on their own. They happen because people show up, week after week and year after year. They write code, review pull requests, document features, answer questions, organize meetups and help each other succeed. To recognize that work, we opened nominations for the Zephyr Project Community Awards and invited the community to tell us who has made a difference.
The response was overwhelming. We received dozens of thoughtful nominations across six categories. Our selection committee reviewed every one, and choosing was genuinely difficult. We want to thank everyone who took the time to nominate a colleague. Every nomination was a reminder of how much this community values the people in it.
Winners were recognized in person at an award ceremony at Zephyr Developer Summit in Prague last week. We’d like to congratulate our winners, again, for all of their hard work and support of the Zephyr community and ecosystem.
Distinguished Achievement Award
The Distinguished Achievement Award recognizes sustained, defining impact on Zephyr over the life of the project. This year the committee felt one name simply wasn’t enough, so we are honoring three people who helped build Zephyr into what it is today.
Anas Nashif (Intel)
It is hard to imagine Zephyr without Anas. As one of the project’s founders, he has been there from day one and is still leading it ten years later. He has been the project’s top contributor by commits for years, with more than 2,500 commits to the main branch since 2016. His impact reaches well beyond code. Anas is also the largest contributor to Zephyr’s documentation in the project’s history. He has helped maintain the Sphinx and Doxygen tooling that builds and publishes the docs so many developers rely on every day. Much of what Zephyr is today carries his fingerprints.
Maureen Helm (Analog Devices)
Maureen is one of the people who truly built Zephyr. She has been a visible technical voice since the project’s earliest public releases. While at NXP, she helped establish the vendor-HAL model that let Zephyr scale across many SoC families instead of rewriting every peripheral driver from scratch, an approach that became standard project practice. At Analog Devices, she has made ADI silicon a first-class Zephyr citizen as maintainer of ADI platforms. Her maintainer record spans ARM architecture, sensors, and more. Maureen is also a former TSC Chair and a current TSC representative. That combination is rare: she sets technical direction and then goes back to the tree to maintain the platforms that direction depends on. Through talks on vendor HALs and on contributing sensor drivers, she has also helped lower the barrier for new contributors.
David Leach
David has been one of Zephyr’s defining leaders since its earliest days. Formerly at NXP, he served on both the Technical Steering Committee and the Governing Board, guiding project strategy, governance and growth. Throughout, he consistently championed an open, collaborative and vendor-neutral ecosystem. He supported numerous working groups, helped launch new community initiatives, and was a visible advocate for Zephyr adoption across the embedded industry. Above all, David has been a mentor to countless contributors, helping newcomers find their footing and fostering the next generation of project leaders. Nominators repeatedly mentioned the genuineness and warmth he brought to every interaction. Many of the community practices Zephyr relies on today reflect his influence.
Technical Visionary Award (TSC Honor)
Presented on behalf of the Technical Steering Committee, the Technical Visionary Award honors someone whose leadership has shaped Zephyr’s technical direction.
Carles Cufí (Nordic Semiconductor)
Carles has been a long-standing technical leader in the Zephyr community. He combines significant technical contributions with a sustained commitment to the project’s governance. As Chair of the Architecture Working Group, he has guided the architectural discussions that matter most to Zephyr’s growth and sustainability. He builds consensus across organizations and helps the community reach sound, well-reasoned decisions. His transparent and inclusive leadership has helped the TSC and its working groups scale their impact across the entire community.
Top Committer
The Top Committer award celebrates consistent, high-quality code contributions that move the project forward.
Jordan Yates (Embeint)
Over the past six years, Jordan has been a steady force in Zephyr’s codebase. Since 2020, more than 500 of his pull requests have been merged, totaling over 1,000 commits. His work spans an impressive range: power management, wireless networking, sensors and LTE modem drivers, plus foundational tooling like Kconfig, Twister and J-Link support. He maintains LoRa/LoRaWAN, CMSIS-NN integration and lora-basics-modem. He also collaborates across power management, the native LoRaWAN backend and Trusted Firmware-M.
One example of Jordan’s impact is a Kconfig language extension he proposed. It solved a longstanding problem where dependencies were silently dropped when defaults were overridden, causing hard-to-diagnose build errors. His recent work on the LTE modem subsystem has improved error handling, memory usage, CPU utilization and maintainability. That kind of work helps prove Zephyr is a robust, efficient choice for real-world products.
Workhorse Award
The Workhorse Award honors someone whose tireless and often unseen work keeps the community running.
Henrik Brix Andersen (Vestas)
Henrik Brix is the maintainer of Zephyr’s CAN subsystem and an elected member of the Technical Steering Committee. What sets him apart is not a single headline achievement but his sustained commitment to the health of the project. He routinely helps with issue triage and guides contributors through complex technical and process questions. He participates across organizational boundaries, offering help regardless of company affiliation. Whether he’s answering questions on Discord, contributing to working groups or reviewing proposals, Brix consistently does the essential work that keeps the community collaborative, productive and welcoming. His contributions may not always be the most visible, but they are among the most impactful.
Documentarian
The Documentarian award recognizes someone who makes Zephyr easier to understand, learn and use.
Emil Gydesen (Antero ApS)
Emil has been working on LE Audio in Zephyr since 2018, first for Bose and now as a consultant for Nordic. In that time he has implemented or refactored most of Zephyr’s LE Audio profiles and services, roughly 20 to 30 Bluetooth specifications. He delivered each one complete, with implementation, documentation, samples and tests. He is the main contributor and maintainer of a subsystem that now exceeds 130,000 lines of code. That subsystem is backed by clear architecture documentation that helps others understand and build on it.
Emil shares his knowledge generously. He chairs a weekly meeting for LE Audio contributors, takes part in Bluetooth-related project meetings, presents LE Audio in Zephyr at conferences, and is always ready to point people in the right direction on Discord.
Ecosystem Amplifier Award
The Ecosystem Amplifier Award honors someone who spreads the word about Zephyr and helps the whole community connect and grow.
Fabio Baltieri (Google)
Fabio is everywhere in the Zephyr community. He is involved in nearly every working group, co-hosts the Zephyr Podcast with Benjamin Cabé, and regularly shows up at events to connect with developers. He also looks for ways to make contributors’ lives easier. He proposed practical improvements like the PR dashboard, which lets contributors see their assigned pull requests and pending reviews at a glance. Through his energy and visibility, Fabio helps bring new people into the project and keeps the existing community connected.
Congratulations to our winners!
Congratulations to Anas, Maureen, David, Carles, Jordan, Henrik Brix, Emil and Fabio. And to everyone who contributes to Zephyr, whether through code, reviews, documentation, meetups or a well-timed answer on Discord: thank you. You are the reason this project has thrived for ten years, and the reason we’re so excited about the next ten.
Want to get involved? Visit zephyrproject.org to learn how to contribute, join a working group, or connect with the community on Discord.