Those in the know, know that “Till Next Time” is the tagline of Derik Whittaker.
I don’t remember which of us (where ‘us’ refers to Derik, Sergio, and myself) made the post (and I’m too lazy to look it up), but one of us made the suggestion on the old alt.net Yahoo mailing list that people in the Chicago-land area should get together and think about setting up an alt.net group. We met at some bar up north of Chicago (I’m thinking Fall 2007). In any event, the meeting went off well enough that Chicago alt.net was born.
Sergio and Derik have basically headed the group ever since.
Anyway, after talking about it for a long time, Derik is finally moving to North Carolina.
Those that know Derik already know all of this, but Derik is one of the coolest guys I’ve ever met. Besides the fact that we share some common interests about development stuff, he’s intelligent, funny, and, well, there’s no other way to say it, a nice guy. He’s opinionated (and as people know, I’ve ragged him at times when our opinions didn’t exactly match, but whatever, that’s how I roll), but he knows his stuff and knows how to present it.
Besides the blog that he writes, he’s the creator of the Dimecasts site. This is a site that I wish had existed 4 or 5 years ago when, as a .NET developer, I started to learn (slowly, very very slowly) about better ways of programming. The site has (at the time of this writing) almost 140 episodes ranging across a wide variety of topics, and even an experienced developer should be able to find something to learn about there.
He’s not dying, of course, he’s just moving, but I’ll miss getting to interact with him at the meetings. And I think maybe Sergio might need more help.
Derik does a lot of presentations and conferences and whatnot, so if you have the chance to meet him, take the opportunity. It will be worth it, he’s an awesome dude.
Till next time, Derik.