I would like to be able to nominate the Backdrop development team for a gold medal! Unfortunately I have no idea how or where I could do this. In recent weeks I have watched with amazement all the development activity on Github as team members proposed, tested and made changes to Backdrop's core system, ready for its release as version 1.4.0 on May 15th. As an enthusiastic user of Backdrop may I say to those who worked so hard a huge 'well done!'.
Some of the improvements amount to a big step forward in the usability of Backdrop for web development and it is, in my opinion, now way ahead of its parent Drupal 7. Other changes have been in the development infrastructure where progress was severely hit by a change to the testing environment provided by Travis. A lot of hard work by a few key individuals overcame this when in other circumstances it might have been a valid reason for postponing the release date.
Some suggested improvements to Backdrop have had to be postponed for 4 months until release 1.5.0 but this is understandable given that the team has been working from a wish list and relying on skilled volunteers to do the coding. I just wish I had the skills and experience to do more.
One final commendation is for speedy resonse to problems: this morning I found I was unable to upload an image using CKEditor in the new release. Not knowing whether it was something I was doing wrong I filed an issue to ask for help. Within minutes I had a response from @quicksketch and in less than an hour I had the fix and had applied it. Thank you, it does not get better than that! With no gold medal to offer, I just dedicate this photo of tulips, uploaded with CKEditor, as my vote of thanks to Nate Haug.