In December 2024, fellow engineer Alice Rum and I organised an event titled “Pull Request Awards” in Miro. The overall style was a light-hearted take on “Academy Awards but for Code”.

Relevant links:

Motivation

Alice and I had a few different goals for the overall event:

  • Entertainment - it had been a rollercoastery year
  • Community - building a vibe of “we’re all working together on this stuff”
  • Recognition - typically teams get credit when something gets built, but it’s good to highlight individuals every once in a while
  • Education - by discussing “great PRs” we can exhibit different flavours of “great work” to inspire engineers

Execution

The idea surfaced just 1 week before basically everyone would take time off for the holidays, so timing was extremely tight.

For a detailed walkthrough of execution tasks, and a reference if you wish to run your own version of the event, read more on this article: Running a Pull Request Awards event.

Positive Feedback

We received exceptionally positive feedback on the event, from regular engineers, all the way up to the CTO. Here’s a couple examples:

Such an amazing initiative executed in record time and with creativity! Thank you and massive kudos to everyone who made it happen! 🙇

Really love the comments added on all the PRs that were shortlisted 🙌 We need a new blog post featuring some of these PRs and an elaboration of why they are good! 💪🏽

Wow, your energy and creativity in diving into something like 1000 PRs and finding fascinating details is inspiring! Thank you for highlighting and celebrating these contributions, it genuinely motivates everyone involved. Grateful to be part of this

Overall there were a few different “flavours” of positive feedback:

  • Engineers liked that the event was grassroots. As one commenter put it: “when such a thing comes as top down it’s usually cringe”
  • The event was quite wholesome and well-timed at the last day before most folks went on holidays. It was an excellent way to wrap up the year.
  • We received a lot of in person thanks, mostly by other engineers who enjoyed the experience
  • During the ceremony, the chat was extremely lively averaging one comment every 7 seconds

Areas for improvement

We didn’t really receive critical feedback. Some folks did express disappointment that we couldn’t cover more ground (repositories) but because we were volunteers and this was a first time thing with no industry comparison, there wasn’t much critical feedback from anyone. There were a few things phrased as “would be really cool if we get X in the future”.

Below if a collection of those, as well as our introspection with Alice on the event:

  • Starting earlier will be great, or even running the submission process all year round with periodic reminders
  • With more budget and preparation we can probably set up a slightly better physical and virtual event, though we need to maintain the grassroots feeling overall
  • We can break the awards down by a scope other than repository, e.g best PR description, or best impact

Conclusion

The Pull Request Awards event has been a success, overcoming both Alice and my concerns. We have seen how much good vibes and value it brought to the engineering community. We’ve also received the buy-in from leadership both to run and grow this event further. It has been honestly fairly loaded for us to run in just a few days, but the reaction has been incredibly positive, and I couldn’t be happier with the outcomes.