Our in-person conference on 17 September has been cancelled, and the 2026 programme has moved online. We have written elsewhere about what that means for the conference itself. This post is about the part of the day we were least willing to lose.
The Awards are now their own event. In December we are closing out the 2026 programme with a featured Awards Show, streamed on The Pipeline Conference YouTube channel. We’re levelling up from a slide at the end of a session to a produced show, with the time and attention the work deserves.
The awardees speak for themselves. Every awardee will have their work on screen and will speak directly to the audience from wherever they are, alongside messages from our judges. If you have ever watched an awards ceremony where someone else reads a one-line summary of a year of work, you will understand why this matters to us.
You can actually talk to them afterwards. We will open rooms on our Discord once the show ends, so you can put questions to the people whose tools you have been quietly depending on. This is the part a ballroom was never very good at.
Far more people can watch. A room in Vancouver seats a few hundred. A stream does not have that problem, and it does not ask anyone to buy a plane ticket to see their colleague recognised.
The categories are the same two we have always run: Pipeline Project of the Year, for the tool, framework, migration or open-source project that changed how a team works; and Pipeline Hero of the Year, for the person whose work, mentorship or sheer stubbornness kept a pipeline standing.
Nominations are closed. Thank you to everyone who put a project or a person forward. Our independent panel of judges has made its decisions and awardees are being contacted directly.
Moving to December bought us something we had wanted from the start and could not fit into September: community voting. We will have more to say about how that works shortly.
The date will be announced in the coming weeks. Subscribe to our newsletter and you will get it first, or keep an eye on the 2026 programme.
To the people who build the plumbing this industry runs on: we will see you in December.
