About Mikeal Rogers
My first impression of Mikeal was honestly, this guy is some sort of super hero. Like where did this guy come out of!
Mikeal and I worked on NodeConf EU, mikeal had such a strong vision for it, how it was to be structured and what it was about. We first met in July 2012 in Portland Oregon at the Jupiter Hotel for NodeConf. Around this time there were lots of great conferences happening and so I’d see Mikeal often - thank to Paul and Eamo for FunConf and some other boutique soirées in Dublin - it was a great time.
Mikeal was so funny - he would wear this 1920’s tweed style jacket and a hat to match and had this old style microphone for talking on stage and would land in Ireland and take us for dinner. He would dead pan ask the waiter for the menu and say- “we’ll order the menu” so we would all share in everything together and nobody missed out. In retrospect I can see how he was so well suited to open source communities and bringing people together.
Mikeal was a funny, intense, highly pragmatic, hipster, hippy with a big heart and had a great imagination, such a passionate person without whom I would not be where I am in life and I know countless others who are the same. One of the things that really stood out about him was his strong bias towards action, and doing things now .. he wasn’t a have conversations and nothing happens type of person. He was a person who had an giant appetite for learning and accumulating knowledge and was an incredible evangelist for whatever that things he was involved in - whether it was JavaScript, distributed systems, coffee, cooking, restaurants, exotic drinks or in recent years Buddhism and the many nuances of the world of sutra translation.
I can remember going on walks back in Ireland just after Mikeal finished up at protocol labs to spend time with his family and he would spend hours talking to me about sutra translation using machine learning - yet again breaking new ground, delving deeply into a new area of understanding for everybody to share in.
Mikeal was very encouraging of my delving into Buddhism also, and a real friend.
I will miss our chats Mikeal, I will miss our meals, I will miss hearing your laugh, I will miss your ideas and your energy.
People like Mikeal Rogers don’t come around very often in life - he was that rare type of person who had a huge impact on the people around him and the things he worked on. I am truly grateful to have been able to know him and call him a friend.
Cian
@mikeal