Perl loses contributor and colleague Iain Truskett

Iain Truskett, or Spoon, will be sorely missed by the Perl community. He died on December 29th, 2003 in his home in Canberra, Australia.

Iain was a tireless contributor to Perl. Along the way, he:

• Wrote 15 Perl modules
  Iain especially loved to automate the web.
• Created and maintained the Perl Books site.
• Contributed two hacks to Spidering Hacks.
• Contributed numerous patches to Perl.
• Contributed many patches to my pet project, WWW::Mechanize
  If it weren't for Iain, I'd still have that bug with the back() method.

Even more importantly, Iain was a great colleague. I never met him, or even spoke to him except through email and IRC, but I feel like he was a friend. He was always willing to help out when possible, and at least discuss an idea when not.

One night, we were in IRC helping someone with a testing problem. The problem was solved with a module that the person didn't know existed. I said "We should get together a list of all the Perl testing modules and summarize what they do. Would you be willing to help out?" A couple of hours later, he'd taken care of A-M, where it took me days to finish up N-Z. Later, when I thanked him for jumping on it so quickly, he confessed, "I was really just avoiding real work. :-)"

Farewell, Spoon. I wish I'd had a chance to meet you before you left so soon. We'll miss you.

Andy Lester is a QA & Release Manager for Socialtext. He is also in charge of PR for The Perl Foundation and maintains over 25 modules on CPAN.

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