James Jessiman Memorial Award for 2021 awarded to Leonardo Zide

[Willy Tschager]

The LDraw.org Steering Committee is pleased to announce that the 2021 James Jessiman Memorial Award (JJMA) recipient is Leonardo Zide.

Leonardo got involved with digital LEGO in the 90s, when he started developing LeoCAD. Later he heard about the L-CAD mailing list in rec.toys.lego and met the early members of the LDraw community there.
LeoCAD was created initially as a standalone application, with its own parts library and file format, but soon it was updated to adopt the LDraw library and file format. It gets regular updates and is part of the LDraw All-In-One-Installer.
Leonardo authored a few parts and contributed fixes to existing parts early on but isn't involved with parts creation anymore. He's a programmer and works with people in the community to develop ideas for the library and file format.

More information on the JJMA can be found at: https://www.ldraw.org/article/222.html

On behalf of the LDraw Steering Committee, we thank Leonardo for his contributions and look forward to working with him in the future.

Willy Tschager

[Philippe Hurbain]

Congratulations Leonardo!

[Magnus Forsberg]

Congratulations.

[Gerald Lasser]

Congrats!

[Lasse Deleuran]

Congratulations Leonardo!

[Takeshi Takahashi]

Congratulations!!

[N. W. Perry]

Belated congratulations! I was just struck by how LeoCAD has been such a long-standing, quiet stalwart of the L-CAD family—from what I've read, much like Leonardo himself!

As far as I can see, there was never any announcement or fanfare about LeoCAD in r.t.l, it just starts being mentioned almost in passing from Aug. 1997 onwards. Perhaps a bigger deal was made in the mailing list than the newsgroup, but in any event, here it is as strong as ever 25 years later, while a lot of other noise and spectacle has come and gone. A truly commendable accomplishment.