Shine On You Crazy Diamond

I created this blog during the Christmas 2015 holidays. One of the craziest year of my life was coming to an end, and for some reason I started to feel the desire to write about what I did and what I learned. I really wanted the first post to be something positive about my experience.

At the end of that week, my colleague Ian Murdock passed away. It took me 6 months to post this. A positive memory, one that I will absolutely never forget.

It was summer in our San Francisco office when, as almost every day back then, someone dropped a few papers on my desk for an upcoming interview. A quick glance at the first page. Ian Murdock. Ian Murdock? How the hell am I supposed to interview Ian Murdock? Good news, I’m scheduled to do the interview together with Jess. Still, how the hell are we supposed to interview Ian Murdock? What do you ask somebody like him?

Well, you ask him to tell his life, which is exactly what we did. Of course we knew Ian for Debian, but we had no idea about tons of the other things he did. He went on for 45 minutes, with an amazing simplicity, and amazing humility, as he was essentially teaching two kids about the history of modern computer science. A history he vastly contributed to write.

We thanked him for this time with us, which made strictly no sense given the circumstances. And as we were about to leave, he told Jess the most amazing things: “by the way, I follow you on Twitter and read your blog: really cool stuff!”.

Crossing your path was an immense honor.

We miss you Ian.