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. Some friends and I 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.]
Happy New Year!
A very happy New Year to all for 2025!
Just a quick note to say that I'm not starting one of my periodic blogging holidays. The New Year and then starting work again afterwards has been quite busy, so I've not had much time to continue with my readthrough of Sebastian Raschka's book "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)". I was hoping to get some done this weekend, but personal commitments got in the way.
I have had some downtime, but just enough to read some fiction -- I'm rereading Connie Willis's excellent "Oxford Time Travel" series, out of order -- I started with the wonderfully whimsical "To Say Nothing of the Dog", and am now most of the way through the significantly less cheerful but deeply moving "Doomsday Book".
I'm also having a lengthy pair of on-and-off discussions with Claude and ChatGPT o1 about the history of attention mechanisms, so hopefully when I get back to the LLM book I'll be better prepared :-)
COVID-19 breakthrough / re-infection: a personal tale
I'm just recovering from (PCR-confirmed) covid after (I believe) having had it in 2020, and having been double-jabbed with AstraZeneca over the course of the last year. I'm completely fine, and listening to people moaning about their health is rather dull, so I won't bore you by posting at length here. But a number of people I know were really surprised to hear about it, thinking that re-infection and breakthrough infections were rare. Given that I, my girlfriend Sara, and a close friend have all had it again (PCR tested in each case) over the last month, it seems that it might be more common than generally suspected -- so I figured that a first-person account might be of some interest.
Ada Lovelace day
I'm a day late, but having just heard about Ada Lovelace day I couldn't but help make a slightly schmalzy post.
The aim of the day is to celebrate women who excel in technology, and while I've worked with some great women developers over the course of my career, there's one who stands out. Yes, it's my mother :-)
Back in the 60s, Yvonne Thomas was one of the first women to do Electronic Engineering (or Electron Physics as it was then called) at Southampton University, and she went on to work at various defence-related companies (that being the best place to be in tech back then). By 1974 she was working on ALGOL compilers at (I think) ICL, and then she decided to pack it in to raise her unruly -- but generally grateful -- offspring. Von, thanks for doing that, and for bringing me up to be technically able. There are few coders out there who can honestly say that they had programming fed to them in the womb, and I'm glad to be one of them.
She's still coding, and is now happily building an ever-expanding web application that links together all the information she's found in her genealogical researches.
Right, enough sentimentality. Back to our regularly-scheduled gadget- and business-of-software-related blogging...
A bit of fun
This week's unofficial meme on the Unofficial Planet Python seems to be to name the programming languages you've learned. Here's Eric Florenzano's list (hat tip) -- it looks like the meme was started by Corey Goldberg -- and here's my list:
- BASIC (an odd ICL dialect, then Spectrum, Commodore, Amstrad, BBC, and QuickBasic)
- Z80 Assembler
- Pascal
- C
- Hypertalk (remember that?
Answer 'Are you sure?' with 'Yes' or 'No'. If it is 'Yes' then...) - Logo
- Prolog
- LISP
- C++
- ML
- Modula-3
- Neil (proprietary, probably still in use at IST)
- Java
- JavaScript
- C#
- Python
Hmm. It looks like I've slowed down. Time to pick up that Erlang tutorial again...
Making a fool of yourself in public
On the Business of Software Blog, Neil Davidson recommends using your fear of making yourself look stupid by failing publicly as a way to motivate yourself to work as hard as you need to work on your startup. Sounds right to me. When I was in my early 20s I saw the mortality rates for smokers and decided that I would give up at the age of 30. In order to make sure that I stuck to that, over the years I told pretty much every one of my friends that I was going to quit then, which meant that I really could not back down. The result is that on the night of my 30th birthday party I quit, and (bar one or two particularly drunken evenings) I've not touched a cigarette since.
Feelix Growing
The grind of applying for patents for Resolver (about which more later) has slowed down work on my own robots, but my partner Lola has been rushing ahead with her ever-so-slightly more professional approach... I'm very proud of her :-)
UPDATE 26 Feb: For some unknown reason, Google has made this post its #1 hit when
you search for Feelix Growing. If you've just come here looking for that, here's
the homepage for the project: Feelix Growing [UPDATE: link removed a few years
later, as it now points to some kind of spam site].
UPDATE 27 Feb: No longer #1. Phew.