It is my great pleasure to nominate my colleague Awais Qureshi (@Awais_Qureshi) as a new core contributor, following the procedure described in OEP-0054. In addition, Awais is volunteering to become a maintainer of the following repositories:
Awais has worked on Open edX for more than 7 years, either as an engineer or as a team leader. He did much of this work while he was embedded in the edX/2U team. This included working on various edx-platform modules, building the credentials IDA from scratch and contributing to the ecommerce and discovery IDAs. Some of the highlights include:
- Migration from Travis to Jenkins CI
- Migration from Jenkins CI to GitHub Actions.
- Figuring out the sha256 session cookie encryption to avoid logouts (I think this was in the Quince release)
Awais has participated in or overseen multiple upgrade projects in Open edX:
- Python 2.7 to 3.5 (that must have been fun)
- Python 3.5 to 3.8
- Python 3.8 to 3.11/3.12 (ongoing)
- Django 1.11 to 2.2
- Django 2.2 to 3.2
- Django 3.2 to 4.2
- Boto to boto3
- MySQL 5.1 to 8.0
- Ubuntu
- Additional Python packages, including: Celery (twice), Oscar, django-storages, django-simple-history, django-cors-headers, and others.
In total, Awais has contributed more than 1300 pull requests to the Open edX project. For reference, that’s about 1% of all Open edX pull requests ever. If you think that’s pretty impressive, then I agree with you.
More recently, Awais has started participating in the maintenance working group. We expect him to join other working groups, including the security working group, in the near future.
EDIT: Awais will be working full time as a community contributor, so he can commit ~100 hours/month to this new role.
The comment period is open from 2024-04-15T22:00:00Z→2024-04-29T22:00:00Z. Thank you for your support 
from me! I’ve worked with Awais on and off since the Python 2.7 to 3.5 upgrade (it was indeed “fun”).