Andre Hedrick (anhedric) has died

[Nate Lawson <nate@root.org>]

Dear Linux hackers,

Sorry for the intrusion on this technical list. I wanted to let Andre's fellow Linux developers know that he died this past weekend. For those that don't know him, Andre was an active developer for the ATA driver a while back.

I have known Andre for about 9 years, although I haven't seen much of him in the past year. He and I attended several retreats together in 2002 and 2003. I'd like to share a story from the first time I met him.

I was a FreeBSD developer at the time and had done some work in the SCSI (CAM) subsystem. I met Andre at a retreat center in the Marin woods. As we ate dinner, he mentioned that he was a software developer. "So am I", I said.

"I work on code for handling disk drives," he continued. "So do I, at least in my spare time," I replied. "I work on Linux," he said. "FreeBSD is better," I joked. He took the insult in fine fashion.

"To work on disk drivers, you have to be a special kind of bastard," he said, his eyes sparkling. "Are you something of a jerk? All the good storage programmers are." We both laughed, and began recounting arguments on various mailing lists about error recovery, queuing, etc.

I saw him a few times in Berkeley after that. His wife and kids were often with him. He, like all of us, was a real person, not just a personality on a mailing list. I've always thought kindly of Andre, and like many of us, he had high standards and an impatience to make things better. I have a lot of respect for people like that.

I'm sorry to bring this news to you, and I'll miss him.

Sincerely,
Nate