As a recipient of a Google Peer Bonus, I was given the opportunity to submit a guest post to the Google Open Source Blog, published on October 27th 2020. For my own archives, and because I didn’t particularly like some of the edits they made, here’s my original version. I was recently awarded a Google Open Source Peer Bonus, which was all kinds of awesome, but also proof that you can contribute things of value to open source projects, and indeed build a career in it, without being a hard-core coder.

I was recently awarded a Google Open Source Peer Bonus (OSPB), by Cameron Shorter, which was such a lovely surprise! Thank you so much, Cameron, for nominating me. I hadn’t heard of the program until I was awarded it, but it allows Google employees to recognise external (eg non-Google) contributors to open source. The really great thing is that it recgonises all types of contributors, including (copied straight from their blurb):