Let Me Give Thanks · Announced for 2026
The awards for the people whose answers you found.
Documentation, postmortems, open source tools, podcasts, communities — once a year, the DevOps and SRE practitioners who give away how production really works get a Golden Answer.
Why these awards exist
The industry keeps score for products. Almost nobody keeps score for answers.
Our sibling domain, lmgt.com, is a long-running joke — “Let Me Google That” (or “Let Me Get That,” depending on who you ask) — for people who ask you a question instead of searching for it. This domain answers the joke sincerely: Let Me Give Thanks.
Every fix anyone ever googled at 3am was written down by somebody — a postmortem, a docs page, a mailing-list reply, a README, a podcast episode that finally named the failure mode. That work rarely shows up in vendor award seasons, because it was never for sale.
The LMGT Awards exist to find those people and thank them — in public, once a year, with a permanent Golden Answer page and two co-equal honors: a Jury Award from named practitioners, and a People's Choice from confirmed public votes.
They are free to enter. There are no paid categories. Companies can win for what they gave away, never for what they sell. And because Teller's Tech also publishes eligible work, the conflict rules are printed on every page: publisher-affiliated entrants are People's Choice only, marked in the clear, and never Jury-eligible.
Read the governance in full → · Help build the judge panel →
Two rules govern everything
Work that helps people run software in production, published somewhere anyone can reach it.
Companies are eligible for what they gave away, never for what they sell.
Entry is free for the 2026 cycle. Finalists are chosen by a named judging panel; two honors per category are decided by jury and by public vote, and every vote count is published.
Thirteen categories, twelve of them under four pillars
Where the thanks go
Learn
- Documentation of the YearFor the reference material people keep open while they work — runbooks, architecture notes, how-tos, and docs sites that make a system operable.
- Public Postmortem of the YearFor a single incident write-up, published where anyone can read it, that taught the rest of us something we did not have to learn the hard way ourselves.
- Explainer of the YearFor a single piece that made a hard production topic clear — one article, thread, diagram set, or deep dive that people send to teammates with “read this.”
Make
- Open Source Tool of the YearFor software given away that helps people run production — operators install it, fork it, or wire it into their stack without buying a license to start.
- Learning Environment of the YearFor places to practice — labs, sandboxes, game days, and interactive environments that teach production skills without requiring a paid seat to try.
Give
- Community of the YearFor a group that held space for practitioners — a Slack/Discord/forum, user group, or working community where people get real answers about running systems.
- Creator of the YearFor a person whose public body of work this cycle kept showing up in other people’s toolkits — consistent, free, and aimed at people who run systems.
- Mentor of the YearFor someone who gave time — pairing, office hours, review, sponsorship — in a way that left a public trace others can still find.
Teach
- Podcast of the YearFor a show that kept teaching production engineering out loud — interviews, deep dives, or narrative episodes practitioners actually finish.
- Newsletter of the YearFor a recurring written signal — the inbox brief people forward to their team because it catches what matters in production engineering.
- Blog or Written Series of the YearFor ongoing writing — a blog, column, or series that kept publishing useful production engineering work across the cycle.
- Conference Talk of the YearFor a talk that traveled — a conference or meetup session whose recording or materials still teach after the hallway track ended.
All thirteen carry the same two co-equal honors, and Sustained Thanks — a non-competitive honor selected by the editors — sits outside them: twenty-seven honors a year. Full definitions, examples, and exclusions →
What a winner receives
A Golden Answer — a permanent page that never moves, a badge to embed anywhere, and the public thanks of the practitioners whose nights their work saved. Two honors per category: the Jury Award, decided by the judging panel, and the People's Choice, decided by confirmed public vote. Neither outranks the other.