On 08/23/2018 02:15 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen wrote:
> On 08/22/2018 02:46 PM, Jim Sheldon wrote:
>> I worked with Kevin for a short time about 10 years ago, this is very
>> sad, he was a great person.
> Seconded.
>
> The obituary for the more general audience doesn't necessarily do justice,
> for people who actually knew him in more specific capacities; I guess that's
> not
> really what it's for, though.
>
> I remember him as someone who was at home in Perl, who edited in emacs,
> who preferred feature-tests to platform-checks, whose response to being laid
> off
> was something to the effect of "on the up side, I'm done fighting with that
> svn merge
> a lot sooner than I thought I would be"; and who preferred butterfly yo-yos
> because
> they made string-tricks easier.
>
> I remember the first conversation I ever had with him, when I first met him,
> I think I said "I... kind of like Python, actually. Does that mean
> that we can't be friends?". He took a moment to think that over.
> (though in reality I was actually writing mostly Perl code at that point,
> myself...)
>
> And I remember when he later introduced me to Valgrind.
>
> But "how we _go about_ remembering people" is something that I personally feel
> like I don't really have a good handle on; I think, maybe...,
> if you'd like to spend some time remembering Kevin the way some of us knew
> him,
> it might make sense to visit these:
>
> * Kevin's github profile: https://github.com/kdc1024/
> * Kevin's blog: http://kdc-blog.blogspot.com/
>
> Alas Kevin's tribute page for Elephant Memory Systems disappeared some time
> ago,
> and the wayback machine doesn't even have a copy. A bit ironic, that....
> I kept meaning to ask him if he still had a copy of it somewhere..., but
> forgetting
> to actually do so.
>
> I was trying to hire him last year. That I'll never get another chance at that
> is... I don't know--"supremely frustrating".
>
>
I've worked with Kevin for the last 4 years, up until a couple of days
before he died (he was out sick for a couple of months and had come back
part time and had seemed to be doing better when the complications
caught up with him). I miss him tremendously, and not just because he
would bring delicious baked goods on occasion (-: Always willing to go
the extra mile to do something the right way so as to do right by our
customers, patient and methodical even in a crisis, always happy to
help, even with the nasty maintenance stuff I didn't want to do. He and
I were a team (a very small team!) inside a very large company. He was
my mentor when I was first transferred to work on this project, walking
me through the crazy ins and outs of getting started, then as the team
was transferred elsewhere to work on other projects and just the two of
us were left to maintain and patch it, we made things better, slowly but
surely. I had just finished a prototype of a tool to handle some
drudgery for us in a way that I knew would suit his style, and was
looking forward to showing it to him when he was back full-time.
My chat window is empty.
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