I was going to title this “Say Goodbye to Craig,” but I don’t want to say goodbye. Rather, I want to remember all of the good things that he brought to the IBM i community and the contributions to our team at IBM.
Craig’s humor and intelligence were always inspirational to me. He had a great gift for weaving humor into his technical presentations. One of my favorite examples of his humor is when he talked about IBM i security. He would show a slide and explain that the picture of a large number of people was of the presenters at a Microsoft Security conference. He would then show a slide of the attendees of an IBM i security conference – a handful of people enjoying the beach! His presentation style was great and he had a talent for taking dry, technical material and making it understandable and entertaining.
Craig was an IBM i advocate and champion of the community. He recognized that the i ecosystem is much more than people using technology – that there’s a culture within the i community that goes beyond technology. That’s one reason Craig was a great supporter of starting these blogs. We wanted to have a link from the IBM development lab out to that IBM i community. Craig worked with the editors at IBM Systems Magazine to get these blogs started. Craig would joke with me about getting my blog out on time every week, while he had it easy and only had to get one done a month.
Craig was also a key contributor to our IBM i software release plan. Those of us on the team, led by Steve Will, work on determining what features will be in the next software release. We relied upon Craig’s knowledge of the marketplace to validate our plans – or to tell us what we were missing.
My fondest memory of Craig is when we attended the COMMON Europe Advisory Council (CEAC) meeting in Barcelona. We had a free afternoon, so Craig, Guy Havelick and I went to the Picasso museum, then found a nice spot outside of the Santa Maria Del Mar and spent the rest of the afternoon sipping Sangrias, people watching and simply enjoying the day. Maybe it was the beautiful weather and the wonderful location – or maybe it was because we had a couple too many sangrias – but we had a great afternoon enjoying Barcelona and laughing and talking.
I’m fortunate to have known and worked with Craig; he will truly be missed. My heart goes out to his family and my thoughts are with them.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.