[FreeBSD-Announce] Death announcement for John Birrell

[Arwuah _]

Craig-

I just wanted to say what an excellent write up that was. I don't know
John, but I can tell just what a great personal and mentor he must
have been.

Thank You & Best Regards,
Arwuah

On 11/24/09, Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc at freebsd.org> wrote:
> Dear Friends,
>
> It is with great sadness that I announce the passing of FreeBSD
> committer John Birrell <jb at freebsd.org>.
>
>
>
>
>
> John Birrell  / jb at freebsd.org
>
> BACKGROUND
> ==========
> John Birrell was a Unix developer since 1988 and a FreeBSD user since
> version 1.0.5.
> He had a Bachelor Degree in Engineering (Electrical, First Class Honours,
> 1981)
> from Monash University in Australia.
>
> Over the years he developed with various commercial Unix variants such as
> SysVR2/3,
> Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, OSF/1 and SCO and several embedded operatings systems
> like VxWorks, LynxOS and Microware's OS9.
>
> In the open source world he was once a user of NetBSD and OpenBSD in
> addition to FreeBSD.
> Afterwards, he preferred just to use FreeBSD.
>
> In 20 years of consulting he worked in the automotive, building materials,
> pharmaceutical, petrochemical, telecommunications, defence and business
> systems industries.
>
> John worked on an oil rig in China, for Ford in Australia, and for other
> customers
> in Philippines and other parts of Asia.
>
> While on a business trip visiting his employer Juniper Networks in
> Sunnyvale, California,
> U.S.A., John suffered a stroke, and passed away on November 20, 2009.
>
>
> FREEBSD CONTRIBUTIONS
> =====================
>
> John Birrell was a member of the FreeBSD project, for over 12 years,
> and could commit to the FreeBSD source code.  John felt passionately
> about FreeBSD, and his contributions to this software project were many and
> varied:
>
> - port of Sun's DTrace to FreeBSD (2007)
> - contributed BSD licensed libdwarf to FreeBSD  (2008)
> - contributed initial implementation of FreeBSD on DEC Alpha, from NetBSD
> (1998)
>     -> this was the first 64-bit OS that FreeBSD ran on
> - contributed original libc_r pthread implementation to FreeBSD before KSE
> (1998)
> - contributed to port of Sun UltraSPARC-T1 (Niagara) to FreeBSD (2005)
>
> John also participated as a mentor in the Google Summer of Code project.
> For Google Summer of Code, John mentored students in various FreeBSD
> projects that were funded by Google.  Mentoring new developers and
> colleagues
> was something that John felt very strongly about.
>
> John also liked to attend BSD conferences.  In May 2009, I attended
> the BSDCan conference with John in Ottawa, Canada.  He was in his element,
> and had many interesting and animated discussions with other FreeBSD
> developers,
> including people like Randall Stewart.
>
>
> JBUILD
> ======
>
> As part of John's work at Juniper Networks in 2008, John started working
> on a project called jbuild.  jbuild is a modification of the
> FreeBSD make(1) utility, which adds improved dependency tracking as a first
> level feature, by tracking read/write system calls of all invoked utilities,
> either by using DTrace, or by using a special kernel module named filemon.
>
> At Juniper, the project is ongoing and will be deployed as part of the
> software build at Juniper next year.
>
> Although this work was started in response to needs at Juniper,
> John was quite passionate about pushing this work back to FreeBSD, in order
> to improve the FreeBSD build.  John observed that in FreeBSD,
> a "make universe" which verifies that all code changes work on all
> architectures takes so long that very few people actually do it, so
> less popular architectures often get broken.  John also observed that
> by simplifying a "make universe" and other "buildworld" targets often
> rebuilds a lot of things unnecessarily, due to the fact that it is "safer"
> to do so, because the dependencies are not tracked as accurately as they
> could be.
>
> John has a branch in the FreeBSD svn repo for building all of FreeBSD with
> jbuild here:
>
> http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base/projects/jbuild/
>
> I will update this branch as I have time, but it would be nice if folks in
> the FreeBSD community could keep this work alive.
>
> John was keen that distributions like PC-BSD could adopt jbuild.
> John wanted to simplify the FreeBSD build, to make it easier
> for people to make new distributions based on FreeBSD.
>
> Let me know if you want to learn more about any of this stuff.
>
>
> PERSONAL
> ========
>
> John lived alone on a 118 acre rural property in Apollo Bay, Australia,
> which
> is on the southeastern coast of Australia, approximately 4 hours from
> Melbourne.
>
> His house was not connected to the local grid.....his water supply
> was obtained from tanks on his roof which were filled with rainwater.
> His electricity was supplied by solar cells.
>
> On one trip to Sunnyvale in 2008, he bought an alcohol distilling device
> which he brought back home.  His goal was to try to grow potato and sugar
> beets on his property, and distill them into alcohol, so that he
> could fuel is car with ethanol instead of gasoline, thus having
> a very minimal carbon footprint.
>
> John was also passionate about animal welfare.  He owned a few
> cats, and just bought a puppy dog in 2009.  In 2008, when massive fires
> swept much of the Australian countryside, he took time
> off of Juniper to volunteer with Wildlife Victoria.
> This organization provided assistance to many animals who suffered
> during the fires, such as kangaroos, wallabies, and even pets
> of people who abandoned their properties when fleeing the fires.
>
> John also liked motorcycles.  He told me stories about how he
> motorcycled around Asia many years ago.  He was also hoping
> to buy a motorcycle to garage in California, so that he could
> drive it whenever he visited Sunnyvale.
>
>
> WORKING WITH JOHN
> =================
>
> I worked very closely with John over the past year.
> I was in constant communication with John over IRC chat,
> and Skype.  I also Skyped John into many meetings, to keep
> him up to date on the pulse of what was going on in Juniper.
> Although John was in a remote place, he felt like he was
> in the cube next to me.
>
> John was very patient with me and took the time to explain point by point
> what he
> was trying to achieve with jbuild and why it solved legitimate problems
> with make(1) based builds.
>
> John also had taste for good "expensive" food and fine wine.
> In 2009, as thanks for my help in working on jbuild,
> John treated me to a sumptuous and expensive meal at
> Sent Sovi Restaurant, in Saratoga, California, U.S.A......a fond memory for
> me. :)
>
> John was one of the smartest engineers that I have ever worked
> with, and was a mentor and friend.
>
>
> SUMMARY
> =======
>
> I am going to miss talking to John every day on IRC, hearing interesting
> stories
> about living in rural Australia, and solving new and challenging
> technical problems with him.  His passion really pushed me to work very hard
> on jbuild,
> and learn new things.  I will miss him as a colleague, mentor, and friend.
>
> --
> Craig Rodrigues
> rodrigc at FreeBSD.org
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