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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope that I just notice all of these software deaths because I'm involved in software, but I feel like we're losing too many amazing people way too soon.
