Occasionally folks come into large IRC channels and ask some variant of “anybody alive?”. Sometimes I would reply, “No, we are all ghosts in the shell”.
Today, I logged onto IRC and found out that we did indeed have a ghost in our midst.
Jon “avenj” Portnoy is the type of dude on IRC who always says “hey” back no matter the time. Sometimes I thought the dude never slept. An avid Perl programmer he made me see beauty in a language where I only saw gibberish. #otw will never be the same again but I hope the rest of us can keep the spirit of it alive.
In his memory, I have made a donation to The Perl Foundation. If you wish to do so as well, you can do so from here.
Rest in peace, friend.