Goodbye, Malcolm

https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2013/mar/19/goodbye-malcolm/

by LeafStorm • 13 years ago

671 39 13 years ago

bdesimone• 13 years ago

Wow, what a tragic shock. Does anyone know the details?

jacobian• 13 years ago

Out of respect for Malcolm's friends and family we're waiting to share more details until we know what they're comfortable sharing.

jnazario• 13 years ago

i can't confirm if these are true or not but some details may be in here:

http://storify.com/adrianholovaty/malcolm-tredinnick-memoria...

very sorry for his friends, family, and the community.

shrikant• 13 years ago

I'd not take any details from there to be true just yet, since I just saw someone else on Twitter say it was due to a brain aneurysm.

Depressing news -- RIP Malcolm.

bdr• 13 years ago

Malcolm was brilliant, and sweet. When I submitted my first patch to Django, it was his encouragement that gave me the confidence and motivation to keep contributing. At Disqus, we brought him in for a few weeks of contract work, and watching him clean up the mess we'd made was perhaps the most programmatically-enlightening part of my career so far.

danielha• 13 years ago

I didn't have much interaction with Malcolm when he helping us at Disqus, but I just remembered that he was incredibly smart and very kind. I'm very saddened by this news.

oggy• 13 years ago

Same here, it was him who committed my first Django patch. He also came across as an incredibly nice person, with very thoughtful and kind comments. I've also read some of his ORM code and that was some of the nicest Python I've ever read.

Unfortunately I've never had a chance to meet him, and I haven't really been following the happenings in Django-world for a long time now, but I still felt really saddened seeing the news. Condolences to friends and family.

countessa• 13 years ago

Sad news - RIP.

tkt• 13 years ago

Strangely, this was his last tweet. "Malcolm Tredinnick ‏@malcolmt Woke up late, afternoon nap and I still want to go to bed early. So tired; wasted the day." Nothing about his life was wasted.

hluska2• 13 years ago

I agree completely - nothing about his life was wasted.

Thank you for writing this comment - if I could, I would give you one hundred up votes for it. :(

forsaken• 13 years ago

He also committed my first code to Django. And was amazingly patient with me while I floundered about during sprints that were held in Lawrence, Ks.

He was a great man, and he will be missed in many communities around the web. I was always in awe of his code, including some of the best refactors of Django.

zopticity• 13 years ago

I am sad.

jpitz• 13 years ago

So, that I may thoroughly hijack this thoughtful comment: who, in the OS community, is like Malcolm was? I want to interact with them. I want my first commit to a project to be through them.

po• 13 years ago

In my opinion, the Django core team is full of people who have the same spirit. Many of the core developers [1] are intelligent, professional, introspective and patient and encouraging with new developers. The dedication to civility and quality of community is one of my favorite things about Django.

It's important to take a moment to remember and pay respect when we lose a community member, but as you're expressing here, it is also important to look around and recognize the talent and kindness around us that we can still learn from.

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/committers/#...

harold• 13 years ago

Thanks and Godspeed. You made a difference.

ttrreeww2• 13 years ago

How old was he?

alaithea• 13 years ago

His LinkedIn profile says he went to university in '89-'92, which would put him in his early forties, if he went at a usual age.

ttrreeww2• 13 years ago

Damn, there's a lot of early software people death lately...

fein• 13 years ago

According to the wise oracles of twitter, it was a seizure.

This very well could turn out to be bullshit, but it's all I could find so far.

fvox13• 13 years ago

I only met Malcom once, during the Djangocon US 2009 sprints. Having never contributed to an open source project before, I naturally had no clue what I was doing, but he still managed to make me feel like I had something to offer. What a great loss to the Django/Python community.

rlofthouse• 13 years ago

I'm still completely in shock to hear the news.

When I ran the first DjangoCon back in 2008 I was just a 23 year old programmer. New to everything. All the people there seemed like superheroes to me. I was honoured to have met Malcolm and to listen to him speak. He was a massive inspiration to me.

Malcolm worked incredibly hard for the Django community and we're all better off because of the commitment he made.

Thanks for being an awesome guy, for your dedication and for your knowledge. We'll all miss you :(

turingbook• 13 years ago

It's bad that his personal website is not available recently: http://pointy-stick.com

thedz• 13 years ago

I've always enjoyed watching his talks and reading his slides. He was a brilliant guy who will be missed.

niggler• 13 years ago

Black bar?

chrj• 13 years ago

What a terrible loss.

adrianh• 13 years ago

For folks who don't know the Django world: Malcolm was one of the most prolific Django contributors. If you use Django, you use code he wrote.

I wrote a remembrance here: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/malcolm/

ZenoArrow• 13 years ago

Didn't know Malcolm, but after reading the comments here I watched one of his talks, great speaker, delivered the content in a naturally easy to follow way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXHknWKuG2U

Sorry to hear he's gone. My condolences to his family and friends. RIP Malcolm.

mladenkovacevic• 13 years ago

I don't know him although I now realize I've watched a bunch of his talks on youtube. I'm very grateful for his contributions to Django. It's the best avenue I've found for myself to get into web development and it definitely seems like he will be greatly missed by the community.

qoo• 13 years ago

Rest In Peace

mcos• 13 years ago

alexdong• 13 years ago

In the age of everyone claiming to be the CTO or co-founder of something, Malcolm's first self introduction to me was extraordinarily short: "Hi Alex, my name is Malcolm. I'm a senior developer."

During one two hours conversation at KiwiPycon, he left the strong impression of being one who can argue very convincingly from both side. He made it clear, again and again, that as engineers, there is "no camp" for us to choose. Rather we should all be a bit more patient and make careful "case-by-case" decisions.

acjohnson55• 13 years ago

I didn't know anything about Malcolm until now, but I learned Django 6 months ago to start my startup. Using it has been one of the greatest pleasures of my software development career. I understand from the comments that I owe no small portion of this to Malcolm. Without Django, my startup probably doesn't exist, and for that, I'm deeply grateful. My condolences to those who knew him personally.

tobych• 13 years ago

I've been working with @birdsarah at the PyCon sprints on our first commit to Django. We've had super patient help from core developers Julien, Carl, Aymeric and Honza. Then I wanted to get in touch with one of the people who'd originally worked on the refactoring we're working on, and it was Malcolm, who I'd never heard of, and I was told he'd died the previous evening, and obviously I felt sad about that.

erre• 13 years ago

My Malcolm anecdote: In 2008 the Python users group in São Paulo watched Djangocon, streamed live to the local Google Office. I took and tweeted a few pictures of the screen, including this one of Malcolm: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbp/2833593771/in/set-721576071... . I loved it, he just seemed like the quintessential geek :)

Later that day (IIRC), Cal Henderson gave his "Why I Hate Django" keynote, and at some point my picture showed up in a slide: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Fr65PFqfk#t=53m10s

"Don't make Malcolm cry" :)

unvs• 13 years ago

This is such a tragedy. Malcolm was always very helpful and patient with me when I started digging deep into Django. We've lost a giant. RIP Malcolm.

Goodbye, Malcolm

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