Often someone's obituary gets posted on HN who was well known in some parts of the IT community, but not well known enough to have a Wikipedia page or a bio somewhere.
One thing that I usually want to know (and that's usually hard to find), and it's not out of morbid curiosity, is how old the person was and whether their death was sudden and tragic or more or less natural and expected.
I know the loss hurts in either case, but it's somehow much more comforting knowing that e.g. an 82 year-old kernel dev demi-god grandpa died in his sleep, having lived a long, fruitful life, than that some game dev prodigy in her late twenties got hit by a drunk driver.
RIP Wolfgang, I read a bit about your work and it sounds like you did enough good for several lives.
He was employed 25 years ago, at least long enough to be senior to the author of this post, so that puts a lower bound of 50 (which at least matches with how he looks in his profile on his company's about section).
One thing that I usually want to know (and that's usually hard to find), and it's not out of morbid curiosity, is how old the person was and whether their death was sudden and tragic or more or less natural and expected.
I know the loss hurts in either case, but it's somehow much more comforting knowing that e.g. an 82 year-old kernel dev demi-god grandpa died in his sleep, having lived a long, fruitful life, than that some game dev prodigy in her late twenties got hit by a drunk driver.
RIP Wolfgang, I read a bit about your work and it sounds like you did enough good for several lives.