I know he's not as well known as some of the other legendary programmers whose deaths have been posted about, but this one hit hard for me personally.

I've been a FastLED user for many years now, including in a commercial product, and it was a truly wonderful library. Extremely succinct, and so clear and natural it felt obvious, like the only way it could have been implemented. This is of course much more difficult to achieve than its apparent ease would suggest - especially for a C++ library.

Beyond the library's technically great implementation, it was also open source and permissively licensed, massively enabling both beautiful art and innovative products. And Garcia was very active in the community, helping many people new to hardware development take their first steps.

This is a huge loss, especially for someone so young who could have made so many more powerful contributions to the shared world of code we live in. Condolences to all who knew him personally.