Michael Foord: RIP

Michael Foord, a colleague and friend, passed away this weekend. His passing leaves a huge gap in the Python community.

I first heard from him in early 2006. We had just started a new company and there were two of us on the team, both experienced software developers. We'd just hired our third dev, another career coder, but as an XP shop that paired on all production code, we needed a fourth. We posted on the Python.org jobs list to see who we could find, and we got a bunch of applications, among them one from the cryptically-named Fuzzyman, a sales manager at a building supplies merchant who was planning a career change to programming.

He'd been coding as a hobby (I think because a game he enjoyed supported Python scripting), and while he was a bit of an unusual candidate, he wowed us when he came in. But even then, we almost didn't hire him -- there was another person who was also really good, and a bit more conventional, so initially we made an offer to them. To our great fortune, the other person turned the offer down and we asked Michael to join the team. I wrote to my co-founders "it was an extremely close thing and - now that the dust is settling - I think [Michael] may have been the better choice anyway."

That was certainly right! Michael's outgoing and friendly nature changed the company's culture from an inward-facing group of geeks to active members of the UK Python community. He got us sponsoring and attending PyCon UK, and then PyCon US, and (not entirely to our surprise) when we arrived at the conferences, we found that he already appeared to be best friends with everyone. It's entirely possible that he'd never actually met anyone there before -- with Michael, you could never be sure.

Michael's warm-hearted outgoing personality, and his rapidly developing technical skills, made him become an ever-more visible character in the Python community, and he became almost the company's front man. I'm sure a bunch of people only joined our team later because they'd met him first.

I remember him asking one day whether we would consider open-sourcing the rather rudimentary mocking framework we'd built for our internal unit-testing. I was uncertain, and suggested that perhaps he would be better off using it for inspiration while writing his own, better one. He certainly managed to do that.

Sadly things didn't work out with that business, and Michael decided to go his own way in 2009, but we stayed in touch. One of the great things about him was that when you met him after multiple months, or even years, you could pick up again just where you left off. At conferences, if you found yourself without anyone you knew, you could just follow the sound of his booming laugh to know where the fun crowd were hanging out. We kept in touch over Facebook, and I always looked forward to the latest loony posts from Michael Foord, or Michael Fnord as he posted as during his fairly-frequent bans...

This weekend's news came as a terrible shock, and I really feel that we've lost a little bit of the soul of the Python community. Rest in peace, Michael -- the world is a sadder and less wonderfully crazy place without you.

[Update: I was reading through some old emails and spotted that he was telling me I should start blogging in late 2006. So this very blog's existence is probably a direct result of Michael's advice. Please don't hold it against his memory ;-)]

[Update: there's a wonderful thread on discuss.python.org where people are posting their memories. I highly recommend reading it, and posting to it if you knew Michael.]