January 27, 2010
I was going to title this “Say Goodbye to Craig,” but I
don't want to say goodbye. Rather, I want to remember all of the good things
that he brought to the IBM i community and the contributions to our team at
IBM.
Craig's humor and intelligence were always inspirational
to me. He had a great gift for weaving humor into his technical presentations.
One of my favorite examples of his humor is when he talked about IBM i
security. He would show a slide and explain that the picture of a large number
of people was of the presenters at a Microsoft Security conference. He would
then show a slide of the attendees of an IBM i security conference – a handful
of people enjoying the beach! His presentation style was great and he had a
talent for taking dry, technical material and making it understandable and
entertaining.
Craig was an IBM i advocate and champion of the
community. He recognized that the i ecosystem is much more than people using
technology – that there's a culture within the i community that goes beyond
technology. That's one reason Craig was a great supporter of starting these
blogs. We wanted to have a link from the IBM development lab out to that IBM i
community. Craig worked with the editors at IBM Systems Magazine to get these
blogs started. Craig would joke with me about getting my blog out on time every
week, while he had it easy and only had to get one done a month.
Craig was also a key contributor to our IBM i software
release plan. Those of us on the team, led by Steve Will, work on determining
what features will be in the next software release. We relied upon Craig's
knowledge of the marketplace to validate our plans – or to tell us what we were
missing.
My fondest memory of Craig is when we attended the COMMON
Europe Advisory Council (CEAC) meeting in Barcelona. We had a free afternoon,
so Craig, Guy Havelick and I went to the Picasso museum, then found a nice spot
outside of the Santa Maria Del Mar and spent the rest of the afternoon sipping
Sangrias, people watching and simply enjoying the day. Maybe it was the
beautiful weather and the wonderful location – or maybe it was because we had a
couple too many sangrias - but we had a great afternoon enjoying Barcelona and
laughing and talking.
I'm fortunate to have known and worked with Craig; he
will truly be missed. My heart goes out to his family and my thoughts are with
them.
Posted January 27, 2010| Permalink
