Two Christmases ago was a busy season for funerals. I wrote to you about it.

Among the losses was a new friend and coworker, whom we'd dubbed "Online Real-Time" for his general lack of a brain-to-mouth filter. That's a character defect for most people, but Justin was such a genuinely good man that it was nearly always on the endearing-to-hilarious spectrum.

So. Fifteen minutes ago I was updating one of my code repos at work. I pulled down my counterpart's latest changes, tried to do a build, and my development environment complained that it couldn't find a new form interface it needed:

We hide things in the software you run. We bury our frustrations in comments. We name things after inside jokes. I once got a bug fix ticket that simply read "please make your error logging less witty."

Sometimes we bury a tribute where you will never see it.

Nerds, you can be pretty great sometimes.