Jeff Goff thanks for being a friend

2020/04/06

Jeffrey Michael Goff, born on 25 February 1970 in Charleston, Illinois, died 13 March 2020 in the Bahamas during a snorkeling accident at the end of a cruise through the Caribbean.

Jeff Goff was a good friend for many years. I call somebody a friend who would come over to help me move. He helped with many things. Only after his death I learned about both his parents Michael and Marcia, and his brother, Brandon. My condolences to them, their grief must be unbearable. I learned that in 1973, they moved to Nebraska. There, he went to Milford High School and graduated in 1988. I learned that he was awarded the title Outstanding Student in Computer Science when he got his bachelor of science degree in Computer Science and Mathematics in 1992 at Buena Vista College in Iowa. He did not speak about those things.

Over 10 years ago, we met online. I learned to know him as DrForr, and his online presence was all over the place, and it took a while before I learned about his real name, or how he looked (and vice-versa, of course). I can’t even find when we first met. Maybe before 2010. We did write before 2010.

I wanted to write about Jeff, and where to start was a problem. First, I turned to my email, and was shocked by the small amount of person-to-person mails we sent. Widening my net, I searched a larger section of my email and I found over a thousand mails in which we were part of a group, discussing many topics. On Facebook, we exchanged hundreds of messages via the chat option. Both of us were active admins for the Perl 6 page (now the Raku page) on Facebook, and we did discuss lots of things.

Plus a large amount of messages via SMS, irc, and some other platforms. The text messages via SMS are interesting, I re-read hundreds of messages over six accounts, it seems he switched phone numbers and phones more often than I could keep up with. Half of the exchanges were about where we would meet, date and time and place, and his thoughts about the place, and the games we would bring (or not), and places we would visit together (or not).

We have met at dozens of workshops in the USA, The Netherlands, London, Switzerland, and at least ten big Perl-related conferences all over Europe and the USA. The number of pictures I have of him with me and/or others is quite large and I am still sifting through them to make a memorial page for him on Flickr. We played taxi for him quite often, and I don’t even know if he has a driver’s license.

Each time we met, he wanted a hug, and I am somewhat known for my hugs, and he enjoyed them with a loud exaggerated grrruuuhhh while I pumped the air out of his lungs.

It hardly ever happened (if so, other people beat me to inviting him) that Jeff did not join Liz and me for at least one good dinner at such an event. Or for drinks; he quite appreciated my taste for whisky and other hard liquors. The two times he stayed with Liz and me, we tasted a lot of the different types of whisky we have.

He was one of my most reliable volunteers for FOSDEM, helping with recording video in the Perl room, and for giving presentations there, and helping out at the booth, and joining us for drinks and dinner. His last contribution brought him bits of fame: he took over from me for FOSDEM 2020 in Brussels, and he arranged several volunteers and swag for the booth (we did not get a room for presentations), and several people told me explicitly that he handled like a social beast, so, well done, he made me proud of him.

I have a lot of interests in common with Jeff: books, comics, music, movies, traveling, architecture, photography, technology, science, programming, IT. He made several of those things into his hobbies, plus some other things. He was interesting in so many things, and knowledgeable about them, that I could not keep up. He knew a lot of things about birds. He also went to bird-themed bars and restaurants, and it’s still a bit of a miracle how he found out about them. Together we ran a Perl & origami-themed group on Facebook for some time. He has tried to teach me origami, several times, but I had to disappoint him with my clumsiness, and I will treasure the few origami-folded papers he made for me. He told me about his interest in glass-blowing, and I still have no idea how he got into that, and what he did, never seen an example, but he told me a lot about different technologies he learned.

We joined to visit Spiele Essen (in the expo buildings in the German city Essen, several immense halls filled with all different types of games and cosplay) two days in a row, and together we bought over a cubic meter of games (ok, two-thirds of that were mine, I was a tad crazier, and less worried than him concerning the amount of space in my home). He knew a lot of board and card and other games that I didn’t know yet, and he was always looking out for moments to learn more, and I taught him plenty too. In the following years, each time we planned to visit Spiele Essen, but we never got around to it.

One time Liz and I helped him clean out a storage space he rented. We kept most of that stuff for a while in our basement, till he moved again to another place in another country. We moved his things to his place one car-load at a time. His storage space was a reflection of his life, his interests, his hobbies. So many camera lenses, Rubik’s cubes (and other brands of physical puzzles), origami, juggling stuff, bird-related things, games, books, comics, stuffed toys, calligraphy aids, drawing, writing, Monty Python, and I probably have missed a dozen. Recently he took it upon him to work with a hurdy-gurdy, and my reaction was “really?”, and his only reaction was “heh”, and he kept us informed about his progress.

New were scuba-diving and snorkeling. Out of the blue, while we were at a conference, I think it was last year in Riga in Latvia, he told me about the classes in scuba-diving he had taken and more of them he was going to take, beginners’ level, intermediate level, expert level. Oh, and some snorkeling too. He told me about some of the beautiful things he saw. Man, I was jealous, and so surprised, since, well, he was not the most physical guy.

Most of my friends know Jeff from Perl and Raku. He has a dozen modules on CPAN, under his handle JGOFF, and I hope these orphaned modules will be loved by other people. The same for the Facebook-group Raku (aka Perl6), for which he was one of the main leaders. He has written an immense number of answers to questions, contributions to discussions, articles about different aspects, tutorials on how to do this or that, and more. Numerous people have been educated by him in many presentations and tutorials and workshops at conferences and workshops, and from quite a lot of those a video can be found on Youtube or elsewhere. Just search for “jeff goff perl” or “jeff goff raku”, and do it again and replace “jeff goff” by ‘drforr”, and you can fill the better part of a day just watching him speak and demonstrate and explain, always so patiently, with his distinct voice.

His voice. The first times we met, I hardly could understand him. Like me, he did not like being teased with his voice, and I did not, but he tolerated me wanting to discuss it with him. I explained my own problems with my voice, that I had speech therapy for 3 years -36 years ago- before people could understand me well enough, before I would feel comfortable speaking in public, in large groups, in front of an audience. Maybe he listened to me and changed his ways, or maybe he just grew on me over the years and I changed, because the past years I could understand him fine, and our talks and discussions grew longer. Both of us are fluent speakers of sarcasm, and his dialect was a lot gentler than mine, and sometimes he whispered to me that I had been too mean to somebody, and I hastened to apologise. I’ve never heard him use bad words. Well, I did, but he did it in a gentle way. Even when he was very angry at somebody (which happened, there are a lot of crazy people out there), it was utterly seldom that he used bad words to describe his anger and frustration. He was a good example of the zen that is used in the Raku (formerly Perl 6) community, where bad-mouthing people were met with a friendly welcome and offers to help with the problem they obviously had.

Jeff volunteered easy and often for help at workshops and conferences. He helped me and others at FOSDEM, Dutch Perl Workshop, many Yet Another Perl Conference’s in the USA and Europe, OSCON, T-DOSE, and elsewhere. Carrying boxes, unpacking and later packing boxes, arranging swag, handing out swag, answering questions, joining in discussions, selling books and stuffed animals and more.

He helped out too in Granada in Spain in 2015. That same day he broke his hip and spent the rest of the conference, plus several weeks more, in hospital. I often visited Jeff and did shopping for him (clothes, especially baggy trousers, because he definitely would not be able to wear his own trousers). It took him some years to get mostly rid of the limp he developed after that. We were happy to see that our Spanish friends spent a lot of time to visit him, help him, and arrange things for him in hospital and afterwards.

The past several years he seemed to grow more restless. Moving all over the place. I asked him how things were going in Prague, and he told me he was in France, and so on. He traveled more than Liz and me. I could not keep up with all the different companies he worked for.

Before FOSDEM this year, he was going to stay a couple of days with Liz and me, but because of the unhelpfulness of some other people, that didn’t happen. He was supposed to have stayed for a week or longer with Liz and me, after his cruise, for a week or longer. And later this year he would visit another time. We were supposed to discuss his contributions to the Perl & Raku Conference in Amsterdam in August this year, and he wanted to hack with Liz on Raku. Just before I got the bad news, I made the guest room ready for him. Just like the conference in Amsterdam, this visit is canceled, and I am very sad about my guest room not being used this time.

There are so many ways I will miss this man. I know I am not the only one.

Jeff Goff memorial picture album on Flickr, by Wendy van Dijk:

Obituaries:

By the family of Jeff Goff:

https://www.newsbreak.com/news/0OX9wBe3/jeffrey-m-goff

By Liz Mattijsen:

2020.11 Farewell Good Friend

By The Perl Foundation:

https://news.perlfoundation.org/post/remembering-jeff-goff

By David H. Adler:

http://www.panix.com/~dha/test/DrForrObit.txt