Cathy Knight (then Cathy Pountney) was the top-ranked Southwest Fox 2008 speaker, as measured by attendee evaluations. Her friends Toni Feltman and Jody Meyer felt that she deserved an award for this accomplishment, so they created one and presented it to her at the keynote of the 2009 conference. They filled the cup with chocolates because that’s Cathy’s favorite food (not dessert, food).
Since then, it’s been a tradition for the winner to present the award to the next year’s top-ranked speaker, so Cathy presented it to Rick Schummer for being the top speaker in 2009 and Rick presented it to me for 2010. I had the pleasure of presenting the award for 2011 to Rick Borup. You can watch the presentation at the 19:50 mark of the streaming keynote. Rick has always been one of my favorite speakers: he’s extremely well-prepared and his sessions are always thought-provoking. We filled the award with unshelled peanuts because Rick is a huge baseball (and peanut) fan. Rick unselfishly shared the peanuts with attendees of his sessions. I went to both of his sessions for 2012, Advanced Topics in Mercurial: Taking it to the Next Level and Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing for Fun and Profit, and think he’s a likely candidate to win it again.
Congratulations and well-deserved, Rick!
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