I have an idea that I think would be fun for both the Numba devs and community:
The Annual Numba Award!
Each year you could poll the community for their favourite project using Numba. And then the Numba devs could select one or more projects for a special prize, such as a cool Numba poster signed by the Numba dev-team. The selection criteria could be something like: Greatest speed-up achieved by using Numba. Most original use of Numba. Best contribution to Numba itself. Etc.
You could then give the award(s) out at e.g. PyCon or someplace similar.
@esc to extend our other discussion about Numba fan-merchandise, this idea here is also something that would help create some excitement about Numba.
Numba is a very special and useful tool, so it deserves to be a bigger part of the “computer nerd culture”, and an idea like this might help that.
In the first few years people might just say “meh” about the Numba award. But stick to it and make it an exciting presentation at PyCon, and eventually this is something that people will put on their CV if they won the Numba award, just like Kaggle awards are a big deal now.