Welcome to our Qt Champions for 2021!

It is now finally time to report that @SGaist, @mrjj, @aha_1980 and Orgad Shaneh representing the Qt Lifetime Champions have now come to a consensus on the Qt Champions of 2021! A special thank you to all of you for your help in this regard!

Before getting into the winners of this year, I want to take the time to thank everyone for their nominations and to everyone's contributions from the Qt Community in making 2021 a great year for Qt!

As always everyone who wins a Qt Champion title will be given prizes from The Qt Company, but additionally this year I have been contacted by the kind people at Softanics - https://www.softanics.com/ - who produce Deleaker - https://www.deleaker.com/ - as they also wanted to donate a prize to the winners. Deleaker is a memory leak detector which has integration to all the major IDEs including Qt Creator! What the people at Softanics want to do is give a 100% discount code for each of our winners this year for the Deleaker product. Thank you very much to Softanics for doing this, and I suggest to all of you reading this to go check them out. Maybe you can use their tools as part of your projects as well.

Therefore it is now time to announce the winners of the Qt Champions for 2021. I will start with our Ambassador for 2021 who is Burkhard Stubert! Burkhard has been quite the ambassador for Qt, particular for use on embedded systems. They have a popular blog - https://embeddeduse.com/ - which has plenty of articles on using Qt on embedded systems. Additionally, they have given talks at Qt Days which are also available online, one of which can be seen here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_J5FJaMjas. They continue to promote Qt very actively and it is for this reason that they are our chosen Ambassador for 2021. Congratulations Burkhard!

This year, the winner in our Developer category is Lauri Laanmets. When it was clear that the plans for Qt Location in respect to Qt 6 were not what was expected, then Lauri got involved with starting the work to make sure that it could be available as part of Qt 6 and therefore available to all that need it. In such a short space of time they have managed to get a considerable amount of work done and has been paving the way to make the MapBox plugin usable again too. It is because of this sort of action that we appreciate our community so much. Congratulations Lauri on being our Developer winner this year!

We have two Community Builders this year - Jonathan aka @JonB and Chris Kawa aka @Chris-Kawa. Both of them are active on the Qt Forum and have been helping out users for a long time now. You can easily find their contributions there, helping both new and experienced users with the problems that they are raising. Thank you to you both for your contributions in the Qt Forum, I hope that you will continue to help out the community in this manner. Congratulations to you both on being our Community Builders this year!

We also have two Rookies of the year who are Elisabeth Ortega and Jaime Resano. Both of whom have been active in the Python community in Spain to help promote PySide. Elisabeth hosted a workshop in Barcelona as part of a PyDay conference to promote PySide. Jaime has been active in making the Qt documentation more accessible to Python developers too. On top of that they have been taking part in a couple of Spanish speaking Discord servers, spreading the knowledge about PySide even further and have been porting examples from C++ to Python to showcase more of Qt's capablities in PySide. We hope to see more of Jaime and Elisabeth in the years to come. Congratulations to the both of you!

Evgeniy Dushistov is our winner in the Quality Assurer category this year thanks to their work in reporting high quality bug reports for the Qt developers to investigate. Additionally Evgeniy has also worked on bisecting Qt in order to help pinpoint when a problem has been introduced which helps the developers even further when trying to track down the cause of a bug. All of the efforts in this respect are very much appreciated by the developers and as a result Evgeniy is our Quality Assurer winner this year. Congratulations Evegniy!

Once again, our Fixer winner this year is Ivan Kommisarov! Ivan won the same title last year for their Qbs contributions and once again they have been very prolific in contributing to the Qbs project. One only needs to look at their submitted changes on Qt's Gerrit pages and you can easily spend a lot of time just going through all of their contributions. Ivan is contributing a lot to keep the Qbs project going and also ensuring the integration with Qt Creator is also working. Thanks Ivan for your efforts in this respect, and congratulations once again being our Fixer of the year.

Lastly, but certainly not least, we have a new Lifetime Champion! Denis Shienkov is our Maverick once again this year and as a result since this is their third title he is now a Lifetime Champion! During the last year Denis has once again submitted an exceptionally high number of patches to Qbs and Qt Creator and has continued to keep the Visual Studio code extension for Qbs which brings the Qbs project to an even wider audience too. Their dedication to keep Qbs going as an active project, much to the delight of those who continue to use it over CMake and qmake is what makes Denis our Maverick this year and a well deserved new Lifetime Champion. Congratulations Denis on being our seventh Lifetime Champion!

So congratulations to all of our Qt Champions for 2021 and congratulations to Denis once again on becoming our 7th Lifetime Champions.

Thank you to all of you and to all of your in the community for making this a great community to work with and thank you to Softanics for your very generous prize for our winners. I hope to work with all of you again in 2022! Let's make 2022 an even better year for Qt!