Re: A Tribute to our Colleague Marty Kraimer

["Stein, Josh via Tech-talk" <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

This makes me so sad it's hard to express. I sat next to Marty for many years as he did indeed wail the hell out of his keyboards one finger at a time. He had a collection of Sun keyboards which had succumbed to his onslaught. These were Marty's trophies. His lion's head and elephant tusks from the EPICs safaris. 

He also had a way of destroying his t-shirts. His "thinking excitedly" mannerism of tugging on his collar was a great predictor of something profound about to be revealed. Absolutely endearing.

I also fondly remember the first time I met him - he was teaching an intro EPICS class to some of us (at the time) junior developers. We were crammed into a small conference room at Argonne (this was when APS was still a green field). Marty had a stack of overhead transparencies which he was projected onto one of those new-fangled whiteboard things that were slowly replacing the chalkboards at the lab. He would write notes over the projected image and then, when the next slide was needed, erase and begin the next topic. His enthusiasm was infectious. He was so excited  that when he moved onto the topic of interrupt driven events (or something like that), that he accidently grabbed a sharpie (permanent marker) instead of the dry-erase one, and proceeded to fill up the whiteboard with more notes. Which stayed on the white board basically forever. 

When the APS was completed and we all moved into our shiny new offices, I'm pretty sure Marty took that whiteboard with him.

Even though I haven't spoken with Marty in a number of years, seeing his messages pop-up on Tech-Talk always brought back these (and many more) great memories. It's hard to imagine the end of that communication.

What an absolutely great guy.

Rest in peace Marty.

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From: Tech-talk <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> on behalf of bob dalesio via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Sent: Tuesday, February 1, 2022 7:25 AM
To: EPICS tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>
Subject: A Tribute to our Colleague Marty Kraimer

 

Forgive the non-technical email. Marty passed away recently. As Marty has provided immeasurable support to this community, this seems like the most appropriate way to let everyone know. He was dedicated to building a collaboration on a code base - before there were any text books or scholarly papers or even a name for it - that was open-source. He was a prolific coder, open to help and take help from others. He was meticulous in the production of robust code that many would depend on to operate their facilities. Making mistakes and fixing them is great for making heroes. Making code that everyone depends on and no one ever notices is the work of an outstanding engineer. Marty was an outstanding engineer and he was tireless in this pursuit. He laid waste to many a keyboard with his pounding style. His contributions are fundamental to all of our successes. Have a beer to our colleague, benefactor and friend ---