I’ve just learned that Ken Cavanaugh had passed away. He was my colleague back in Sun, and we had worked on a few small projects together.
When I joined Sun, he was already THE CORBA guy AFAIK, and when I left Sun, AFAIK he was still THE CORBA guy. And I was at Sun for, like 8 years. Not many people have a passion that lasts that long for any given field of technology, and that left me a rather strong impression. I always hoped that I could be like that when I get to his age.
Certain people emits an aura of confidence/reassurance. You can tell right away that he knows what he’s doing/saying when he does/says something. Ken was one of such people for me. He thus obviously commanded the respect he deserves, and you can see it in the guest posts that his colleagues left on his website that that’s not just me. I can really only use English well enough for dry technical matters, so I can’t really describe the feeling very well. I’m just very sorry to hear the news.