Iain Truskett, or Spoon, will be sorely missed by the Perl
community. He
died on
December 29th, 2003 in his home in Canberra, Australia.

Iain was a tireless contributor to Perl. Along the way, he:

• Wrote 15 Perl modules
  Iain especially loved to automate the web.
• Created and maintained the Perl Books site.
• Contributed two hacks to
  Spidering Hacks.
• Contributed numerous patches to Perl.
• Contributed many patches to my pet project, WWW::Mechanize
  
  If it weren’t for Iain, I’d still have that bug with the back() method.

Even more importantly, Iain was a great colleague. I never met
him, or even spoke to him except through email and IRC, but I feel
like he was a friend. He was always willing to help out when
possible, and at least discuss an idea when not.

One night, we were in IRC helping someone with a testing problem.
The problem was solved with a module that the person didn’t know existed.
I said “We should get together a
list of all the Perl testing modules
and summarize what they do. Would you be willing to help out?” A
couple of hours later, he’d taken care of A-M, where it took me
days to finish up N-Z. Later, when I thanked him for jumping on
it so quickly, he confessed, “I was really just avoiding real
work. :-)”

Farewell, Spoon. I wish I’d had a chance to meet you before you
left so soon. We’ll miss you.

Any stories to share about Iain? Pictures? I’ve only ever seen one, and I can’t find it on the web.