John Malathronas

Yesterday I was searching Bluesky for the people that I started following and chatting to back in the early days of Twitter. It was jarring to learn that one of them had recently passed away.

My wife and I were given a copy of John Malathronas’ Brazil: Life, Blood, Soul in 2004, just before we headed off there on our honeymoon. It’s a great read, and I ploughed through it just before we set off on our trip. Five years later, his very distinctive name caught my eye in an internal chatroom at work; it turned out that he was working as a database developer, and we were sitting just a few desks away from each other in the same office. I left the company soon afterwards, but over the next few years we talked a bit on Twitter. He came across as fun, gregarious and full of self confidence. Mary Novakovich’s eulogy makes me wish that I’d got to know him a little more.