Mikeal Rogers has died | Hacker News Reader

Mikeal Rogers has died

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Mikeal was instrumental in helping me get established in the node community when it was super tiny. Being around him was a joy! He made those around him feel part of something special. He made me feel like I belonged.

I was a camp counselor at node camp three years in a row. He created such a magical experience that I cried when I got home, I wanted to live in nodecamp forever. I still do.

Seeing some of the folks posting in here makes it hurt worse. I have so many memories, like I remember all of us riding the bus back and forth to the camp, so much laughter and fucking around. Hanging at each others houses, going to meetups, and just being part of something special. Talking shit thru pull requests. Late night dorking around on meatspac.es etc etc etc I could go on for days.

Thank you Mikeal for all the good times.

When Node was just getting big I met Mikael for the first time at some Node event or another. It’s hard to overstate or forget how welcoming he was, always excited to see folks, and the one getting the energy of the room going.

The more time I spent with Mikael the more I saw him doing all the small things that needed doing for a community, or an event. Even just hanging out Mikael was always so considerate and tried to make things special for everyone.

He will be missed.

His own events were rad. I remember O’Reilly running some giant corporate event (maybe called JSfest) and Mikeal rented out the Marines Memorial Theatre in San Francisco for a couple of days beforehand and had way kore interesting and relevant talks by nearly every major person in the JavaScript ecosystem.

Yes! He organized a barebones conference out of the Meetup office in New York. The premise was that all attendees would do a 10 minute talk on any subject (I think it was called 10conf?). Mikeal spoke about his pour-over coffee setup while using it to make coffee for everyone.

I really enjoyed time I spent with him and appreciated his kindness and leadership in the community. My thoughts are with his family and loved ones.

Memory unlocked! I remember his coffee obsession and him going to extra effort to make sure that his events actually had real coffee rather than the usual conference garbage that was popular at the time.

I never met Mikeal, but was still touched second-hand by the lovely messages on the cancer-diaries repository he opened up[1].

[1]: https://github.com/mikeal/cancer-diaries/pulls?q=is%3Apr

I had the pleasure of meeting Mikeal on IRC when we were just teenagers. Countless hours were spent on owned meetingplace servers getting to know one another. I always found myself impressed with his breadth of knowledge on nearly every topic of conversation.

We let several years pass before reconnecting two years ago this month. We sat at the alameda yacht club for hours discussing family, fatherhood, career, and sutras, his passion was as addictive as it had always been.

With a newborn, he had every reason to avoid meeting, but his nature was giving. By the end we had affirmed our friendship and my heart was calm. We agreed to meet again. My belief is that some day we will.

I love you Mikeal and I will miss you dearly.

Sad to hear this but even happier now about the existence of the Node.js documentary[0]. Glad this happened and that some of his stories of Node’s early days are recorded.

[0] https://youtu.be/LB8KwiiUGy0?t=705

Cancer sucks. I met Mikeal at a node.js conference probably ten years ago and we had a spirited argument. While I didn't agree with him, he galvanized my thinking about what needed to change, and we need more people like that in the world.

He was well-known online for the request module — a name every developer seemed to know.

I first met him in person at playnode.io 2012 in Korea. Despite the language barrier, he patiently listened to my broken English and took the time to answer with kindness and sincerity. That was my first impression of him — and it stayed with me.

He taught not just through code, but through the way he treated others.

Rest in peace.

That trip is the origin of many of my happiest memories. It was amazing to meet you all, and to share that adventure with him. The playnode.io team and the Korean JavaScript community treated us with such incredible warmth and kindness, we talked often over the years about what a wonderful experience that was.

Even when you know it's coming, it's hard to process. Met Mikeal at oscon in ... 2007 I think, where he was presenting windmill as a testing tool for js/ajax. We kept in touch for a few years, and he was kind enough to meet up with me during some travel time in California the following year. He took great joy in introducing me to some tapas place I can't remember now, but I do remember the excitement he had just... telling me about it. That low key passion (tech, food, anything else) is one of the things I still remember about the few times we met in person.

Reading about his cancer last year was difficult, not so much for him directly; he seemed to have made peace with it (that's the impression I got anyway). But it's a reminder of my own mortality, and I know I would not react or continue on the way he did. That's difficult to acknowledge.

Mikeal was extremely welcoming to me when I met him over a decade ago, It was either JSConf or NodeCamp, He was always super insightful and encouraging to my personal growth as an engineer and open source contributor. NodeJS wouldn't be what it is without him, especially the community around it in the early days. I got to work with him for a bit at protocol labs. This is a major loss to open source

I had the pleasure of meeting Mikeal on a few occasions, but mainly I've benefited from his work over the years (initially via the JavaScript ecosystem, and later through the Protocol Labs community).

PouchDB was way ahead of its time, and I'm just now coming around to how crazy cool it was and is compared to most other tech in its space.

He made a great deal of positive impact on technical areas I care about. Rest in peace.

just learning about pouchdb now. why did it not take off you think?

Around 2016 sometimes, a small team (me included) built a "mini" version of our main product (Typeform) which was using PouchDB for syncing forms/answers between the backend and the mobile app (written with Phonegap/Cordova if I remember correctly), mainly so we could have offline capabilities.

Everything worked fine, and was cool to launch something like that since I'm not a mobile developer by any measure. But PouchDB required using CouchDB for the syncing, which was both the first document DB we deployed in our production infrastructure, and the only use case for having CouchDB at all, so we didn't have lots of expertise about it.

I think managing CouchDB ended up being the biggest maintenance hassle at one point, as it was kind of an extra piece, compared to the "real" setup that hosted the other production data. AFAIK, there was no experts on CouchDB at the company either.

So I guess in the end if this "frontend sync library" you're want to use also ends up dictating the backend storage/engine, then make sure you can "afford" a completely new and standalone piece for just that. Unless you're already using CouchDB, then it seems like a no-brainer.

Probably today I'd cobble together something "manually" with Postgres and WebSockets/SSE instead if I was looking to do the same thing again.

I remember 2017, at offline camp, I proposed talking about using offline first libraries with existing backends. Nobody, was interested. Seems the people interested in such tech were pretty much sold on CouchDB.

Just now, almost a decade later, we get libraries like Tinybase and SignalDB.

In addition to the sync issues mentioned, personally I think overcoming the browsers was the real issues. Nobody wanted to support this, the security would have been a contrived nightmare.

Mikeal was the CTO of my 2nd startup, Getable. Incredible human being, foodie, technologist, intelligence and overall caring person. He shared the diagnosis several months back and everything happened so quickly. Thoughts and prayers to Anna (his wife), children and family.

When we worked together, Anna and Mikeal were not yet parents and we were all a lot younger. He is a humble, beautiful human being. I know his spirit will live on with his children. I just don’t know what to say other than sending my love to his family and #CancerSucks

+1 he was a great guy.

Sad in a way on the same day this is posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44241549 (which for me is super inspiring). Mikeal would've done so much with the stronger and stronger AI out there (though perhaps questioning it of course in his own way). His cancer diaries was just one example of how he couldn't help always being a leader in what he did.

oh gosh, I have so many great memories of Mikeal due to the wonderful javascript community, and am really sad to hear he has passed.

I hope others were able to be delighted by spending time with him, as I was.

maybe someone else who gets the inside joke will built a naanument to him.

I had the chance to work with Mikeal in the early node days. He gave me, a weird designer type, the opportunity to make something cool with node. I will always remember him as kind, curious, and optimistic.

What a creative soul. Thank you Mikeal.

RIP Mikeal. Will always fondly remember our random philosophy/religion chats at tech conferences.

He had so much energy for the project in the early days. Although I've moved on to other tech the excitement around Node back then was great. I miss it

Very sad. I had met Mikeal a few times in the nearly Node community hackathons and meetups. He had been in my orbit of Node.js and Oakland communities for decades but we were never close. Always felt like ships in the night. I had been following his cancer diaries hoping for the best. There truly was a magic to that early Node.js hacker house days and Mikeal was a huge driving force for that.

I was not a close friend by any stretch. But I did have the honor of meeting him years ago through friends and spending a little time with him socially.

He loved and did so much for his family, and for the JS community as well.

I am so sad and honestly, angry that he was taken from us so young. He would have done so much more. But also, he certainly did enough. I hope he felt good in the end about how he spent his time.

Rest in peace, Mikeal.

Devastating… I discovered Mikeal like most people did, from curiosity about npm packages in a project.

He wrote a lot of opensource projects and was a refreshingly nice and patient person to interact with on GitHub. Condolences to his friends and family, he’ll be missed in the FOSS world

https://github.com/mikeal

Mikeal was simply an amazing human being. I'm writing this wearing my NodeConf shirt right now—one of the best times I've ever had in any community. Being friends with Mikeal was incredible because you could always pick up where you left off, no matter how much time had passed. During our time working together on ProtocolLabs projects, we talked almost daily about work, open source, ideas, philosophy, spirituality, and of course, hip hop.

He possessed a unique and brilliant intellect paired with a compassionate and generous spirit. His interpretation of Buddhist sutras and other sacred writings through an engineer's lens was insightful and inspiring—the foundation for many great conversations. I had just moved back to the Bay Area around the time of his diagnosis and was looking forward to reconnecting in person. Things happened so fast. Sending love to his family.

A beautiful obituary, a good person. Thank you.

RIP Mikeal, those early NodeConf adventures were life-changing to me, ripped me out of my entrenched MSFT tech life, and got me on a Mac. It's thanks to these events I was able make meaningful contributions to OSS, ultimately ended up giving dozens of talks, publishing books, and have fulfilling career. Without him my life looks very different.

Wow this comes as a surprise and is so so sad. When I was getting into programming a decade ago Mikeal’s twitter was a huge resource in keeping me up to date and learning things about Node.

I never met him IRL, but you form a one way relationship with people you look up to online and Mikeal is one of the people for me. May he rest easy.

I remember one tweet from Mikeal several years ago when he said that OSS have opened up so many doors and given so many opportunities for him and I will remember him with that, because he opened the door for me too, first by making me a collaborator in request (the Node.js module) and then by connecting me with the CEO of the company that I work for. And note that we never knew each other in person, he did it for someone who is literally on the other side of the world, I think that speaks a lot.

I'm happy that so many people remember him, because this is what a community is all about, and he was very much invested into creating one.

Many great memories with Mikeal at the first few NodeConfs, walking around Portland, debates over coffee in Oakland, and NodeConf Adventure at Walker Creek Ranch. Very thankful for what Mikeal has done in the JS community. So sad to hear of his passing.

Mikeals little brother here...

It's been amazing to see everyone's experiences with Mikeal, and it hurts so bad to have lost him so early. I've always looked up to Mikeal in every way, and entry level tech as I am, it keeps amazing me how much he truly had an impact on the way we build and do so many things.

It's been a really hard time knowing I can't ever reach out for wisdom, insight or just a brotherly talk about our families.

I couldn't be happier to have had the opportunities to film TacoConf while on a double bike with Max, or bring my wife and kid to film NodeConf at Walker Creek ranch. Memories I'll never forget, but also saddened I never got more over the years. I always felt like I wasn't up to snuff to do anything tech, and always dreamed of the chance to work with him. Knowing I never will hurts harder than anything I've experienced, but knowing that everything I work on now involves his fingerprint is inspiring.

I love you bro..

I wouldn't be where I am in life without Mikeal. Similar to other stories here, he saw things in people, in me, so quickly and with such confidence, and simply got out of our way to empower us and lift us up.

In true Mikeal style, he was able to introduce me to a new smash burger joint only a couple weeks ago while we were shuttling him around for medical stuff.

I intended to write more about Mikeal in any other medium, but don't think I'll ever finish. Even this isn't enough.

Hugs friend; all the hugs. I know now that I will spend much of the rest of my life aspiring to pay forward what he gave to me & to others.

I remember him being a well-known person in the early days of Node.js around 2011/2012, being on the NodeUp podcast and active on Twitter back then.

I'm sorry to hear of his passing.

Loved the node up podcast, especially the episode on databases. He was always a great presence on there. Played a big roll in getting me back into hobby programming after I finished my undergrad

It reminds me of something many of us go through. You join a new community, you feel a bit lost at first. But then someone like Mikeal shows up and helps you find your footing. Thinking about everything he contributed makes me feel like I have a responsibility to carry that same spirit forward, and try to support others the way he did.

Mikeal used to organize bicycle + coffee meetups in SF many years ago, and was very welcoming to anyone getting into Nodejs.

RIP Mikeal. You were truly an inspiration.

A true inspiration during my journey with Node.js! So sorry to hear the news... RIP Mikeal!

Shit, never expected to see an announcement that a friend had died through HN. Learned a lot from you Mikeal, you will be missed.

Wow, that took me by surprise. I can't say I've followed his exact involvements closely but his name was definitely one I'd come across a lot, especially in the early years of Node.js. I even met him at a conference once, only recognizing that it had been him afterwards and thinking, he's shorter than I had thought. I can't really say much as the encounter was brief but he seemed like a genuinely nice person.

Fuck cancer.

Fuck. What a sad day. So young and talented. Truly heartbreaking

I got to hang with him a little in the early 2010s when I was doing JavaScript work and found him nice and personable. I'm so sorry for his early passing.

Cancer took many loved ones like Mikeal. I wish humanity could beat it for once and find a cure for it...

Dang (or new person) can we please have a black bar?

Everyone that sends an HTTP request in Node uses Mikeal’s work: firstly he wrote the first NPM module to handle HTTP requests and then he worked tirelessly to ensure that module was never needed and high-level excellent HTTP support was built into node JS itself.

Mikeal also worked on freeing node.js from Joyent via the iojs fork, and ran node events way before it was commercially viable to do so.

I really appreciated his work on setting up governance for Node (in addition to his work on request and other stuff as other people have mentioned). It is probably largely forgotten now, but at the time it seemed like a big risk to Node being able to move forward technically and generally. I remember that the day Joyent agreed to let go of Node, he posted somewhere about celebrating at a bar in Oakland, where I lived at the time, but I was tired and didn't feel like being social so didn't attend, which I have always regretted since it would have been great to meet him in person and celebrate the victory.

How tragic. I only had the pleasure to work with Mikeal for a few months but always found his presence wise and humble. He consistently approached decisions with the kind of pragmatism that came from a wealth of experience. I hope his family and loved ones cope through this time.

RIP dude! You were truly one of a kind.

I might feel bad if I only knew who he was and, so far, I haven't been able to find that out and no one has mentioned it here.

Mikeal Rogers was a prolific Node.js developer and community leader. He created the popular "request" library, ran the initial NodeConf events, helped design the npm registry, and provided a strong leadership that helped get Node.js into a foundation structure with open governance.

+1 isaacs – Mikeal is why Node.js is the success it is today

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