Matt Lightner – according to posts on his Facebook – is dead. It apparently happened on Christmas day, which just adds supremely to the suckiness of it all.
You may remember him from that little hosting company called Site5 he started when he was 15. You know the one that was one of the, if not the first, hosting company to offer Ruby on Rails support.
I had the pleasure of working with Matt around September last year and ended up visiting him in San Francisco. We went to Antonio’s Nut House where we drank and played darts (and ate way too many free peanuts). Then we went back to his apartment where I got to sleep on an air mattress. That morning we went for bagels at a place not too far away from the Nut House. Those are my favourite memories of San Francisco.
He was such an amazing guy and will be terribly missed.