Below is the list of top committers to the Blender project in 2022. The number of commits obviously doesn’t mean much, but it’s a neutral metric to put a limelight on people who made Blender possible last year.
Out of these 27 names, 22 developers were employed by Blender Institute (BI) or work with a Blender Foundation Development Fund grant.
Lukas Stockner (39)
Germany, developer, part-time development grant. Lukas is a member of the Cycles module. He worked on an updated principled shader and helped with bug fixes and code review.
Damien Picard (47)
France, developer, volunteer. Damien helped with bug fixing and translation.
YimingWu (57)
China, developer, part-time development grant. Yiming is both an artist and a developer and he improved performance for line art rendering and added shadow support to it.
Thomas Dinges (57)
Germany, developer community coordinator, BI employee. Thomas is the release manager and also responsible for onboarding, moderation, coordinating Google Summer of code and always there to help out developers online.
Omar Emara (68)
Egypt, developer, full-time development grant. Omar develops the viewport compositor and helped with bug triaging.
Dalai Felinto (71)
Brazil, development coordinator, BI employee. Dalai leads the BI developer team and is product manager for the Geometry Nodes project.
Sybren A. Stüvel (76)
Netherlands, senior developer, BI employee. Sybren released a major new version of the Flamenco render manager this year and he is the head of the Animation and Rigging module in Blender.
Harley Acheson (87)
Canada, developer, volunteer. Harley is an active member of the User Interface module.
Ray Molenkamp (92)
Canada, developer, volunteer. Ray leads the platform module and is the go-to person in the Blender chat channels, ask him anything, he knows!
Aras Pranckevicius (95)
Lithuania, developer, volunteer. Aras significantly improved performance for file I/O and other core areas and also fixed bugs in the OBJ importer and exporter.
Aaron Carlisle (107)
USA, developer/writer, half-time grant. Aaron keeps the user manual on docs.blender.org working. He’s increasingly turning into an all-round developer.
Philipp Oeser (112)
Germany, developer, BI employee. Phillipp leads the triaging, bug fixing and patch reviewing efforts on blender.org.
Richard Antalík (112)
Czech Republic, full time grant. Richard works as a triager and is the key contributor to video editing in Blender.
Kévin Dietrich (113)
France, developer, full-time grant. Kévin worked as a core team member of the Cycles module, working on production features and performance such as GPU subdivision support.
Chris Blackbourn (127)
New Zealand, developer, part-time grant. Chris worked on better UV unwrapping.
Antonio Vazquez (166)
Spain, senior developer, volunteer. Antonio is the lead developer of the Grease Pencil module in Blender. Grease Pencil is a key reason for bigger studios to get into Blender. It all starts with concept artists and storyboarders!
Joseph Eagar (191)
USA, developer, development grant. Joe is working on the Sculpt/Paint/Texture module and implements new features and also improves performance and stability of it.
Germano Cavalcante (198)
Brazil, developer, full time grant. Germano’s main task is triaging and bug fixing, but he is increasingly active in the modeling and rendering modules.
Jeroen Bakker (251)
Netherlands, senior developer, BI employee. Jeroen is part of the rendering team, the go-to person for everything viewport and GPU related.
Julian Eisel (273)
Germany, developer, BI employee. Julian is a core member of the User Interface module. He further improved the asset system this year and also worked on library overrides and the outliner.
Sergey Sharybin (294)
Russia, principal developer, BI employee. Sergey worked on his favourite part of Blender again, motion tracking and also helped with Cycles rendering and bugfixes.
Bastien Montagne (400)
France, senior developer, BI employee. Bastien is an owner of the core module, his main concern is to keep Blender files and overrides working.
Jacques Lucke (463)
Germany, senior developer, BI employee. Jacques is the lead engineer of the Geometry Nodes project.
Brecht Van Lommel (475)
Belgium, principal developer, BI employee, rendering architect. Brecht continued to improve the Cycles renderer this year and worked on the layered texture design.
Clément Foucault (491)
France, principal developer, BI employee. Clément is the lead designer of EEVEE and GPU rendering in Blender. He works on EEVEE 2.0 and viewport compositing.
Hans Goudey (1164)
USA, developer, full time grant. Hans is a highly valued member of the Geometry Nodes project.
Campbell Barton (1596)
Australia, principal developer, full time grant. Campbell is indispensable, he contributes to nearly every core module in Blender.
I wish all of the people above, and everyone who contributed to Blender a healthy and happy 2023!
Thomas Dinges
28-12-2022