In memoriam: Michael Foord 1974-2025

[guido (Guido van Rossum)]

Through Nicholas Tollervey the news reached me that former core dev Michael Foord has passed away. Michael, an original thinker if there ever was one, started the tradition of having Language Summit events at PyCon, IIRC together with Barry Warsaw. He also wrote and contributed the influential mock library.

I have met Michael enough times to have some really good memories of hanging out with him. Once he explained to me (over a pint, of course) how much vaping had helped him end his lifelong smoking addiction. I still have this incredibly beautiful image etched in my mind of Michael showing me how his elaborate vaping device worked.

But Nicholas said it better than I can: My friend Michael | ntoll.org

PS. Feel free to post your own (positive) memories of meeting Michael – perhaps his children (10 and 13) will read them when they’re older and this thread might help them remember their father.

[tim.one (Tim Peters)]

I never met Michael, and I’m sure I’m poorer for it. He was, at times, deeply troubled, but also deeply caring, hilarious, infuriating, and insightful. He almost never posted on Discourse, because his straightforward, unfiltered, and passionate style was sure to offend.

But we debated many things with joy and directness on Facebook over the years, and in private, and he was one of my favorite correspondents. No matter how verbally intense it got, I’m sure that, if it were physically possible, at the end we’d go to the pub and share laughs over a pint with no hard feelings at all.

He was a treasure in so many ways, but Nicholas already said it better than I can.

@voidspace, you’re already missed sorely - you were truly one of the best of us

[smontanaro (Skip Montanaro)]

This is sad. I didn’t know Michael personally, just a bit of exposure on various Python-related forums. My heart goes out to his family and friends.

I wouldn’t have replied to Guido’s post except it occurs to me that the Python community has lost enough key contributors over the years (Aahz and Fredrik Lundh come immediately to mind, but I’m sure there are several others) that perhaps they should be memorialized in some small way in the Python distribution, maybe by something as simple as adding a relevant emoji next to their name in Misc/ACKS.

[ambv (Łukasz Langa)]

Michael was a major reason I pursued core development. He was the first core developer I met in person. It was back in 2007 at an experimental conference called RuPy in Poznań, which brought together fans of the two programming languages. I gave my first public talk at the event, and it went terrible. Michael gave me some direct but kind feedback about what went wrong and how to improve.

Two years later, I went to my first international conference (EuroPython in Birmingham) and he was the only person I recognized, so I followed him around shamelessly. He hid his annoyance very graciously, and when I returned in 2010, he treated me like a friend. It meant everything.

After that event, talking to core developers on #python-dev on IRC no longer felt like speaking up in a room of mysterious strangers. I started contributing. As the author of configobj, he reviewed my early patches to configparser in 2010, along with Fred Drake and Raymond Hettinger.

The picture is us at PyCon US 2018 in Cleveland.

[barry (Barry Warsaw)]

So very sad. Michael was a singular personality, weird and wonderful, and we clicked immediately. He was someone you really just had to like, and his unique experience and outlook on life guaranteed interesting and thoughtful conversations, of which we had many.

He and I worked together at Canonical for several years. He was enthusiastic about applying there and I helped as much as I could, and advocated strongly for him. We had many excellent^[1] discussions when management decided that the (working) project he was on had to be rewritten from Python to Go. He showed me around when I visited London on a Canonical sprint back in 2008.

I went through my email archives to help jog some memories. I think that first language summit was for PyCon 2009 in Chicago, and I think Michael ran the 2010 summit solo, and we teamed up in 2011. I have a fun email thread with Michael back in 2009 (Python 3.0.1/3.1.0 time frame) talking about the JFDI acronym (coined by a fellow Canonicaler at the time), and Michael’s nomination to the PSF on 2009-02-25. Lots of great chats about unittest, bzr, argparse, code reviewing, Python style^[2], enums, and more. I’m not mistaken, Michael was instrumental in the development of IronPython, the .NET implementation of Python, and was also a PyPy contributor and advocate.

Nothing though approached his exuberance, joy, happiness, and love than the emails where he was announcing the birth of a child.

RIP @voidspace, my friend.

---

1. and colorful! ↩︎

2. apparently where I picked up spelling out foo(somebool=False) ↩︎

[mitsuhiko (Armin Ronacher)]

I’m deeply saddened by this. I’m not sure if Michael knew how much of an impact he had on me. I first met him in person in 2009 at EuroPython in Birmingham. He was easy to talk to, connected me to other people and really helped me fit in. I still remember that conference a lot and a big part of that was Michael. Also the oldest picture on my photo stream on my phone is one Mark took took of me, Mark Ramm and Georg Brandl at a dinner at that very conference. Maybe my life would have turned out quite a bit different if it wasn’t for him.

I appreciated the weird and fun talks we had over the years and I loved passively taking part in his life through the many pictures he took.

[mcdonc (Chris McDonough)]

Wow. This hits hard. I didn’t know Michael well but our paths always seemed to cross. At most US PyCons over the course of a decade, we had banter outside, and it was always a joy to watch his mind work. At one of those PyCons, he told me he had been homeless for some time a half decade past, which I found unikely because he was so eloquent and charming. Maybe ten years ago he visited North Carolina for a shared friend’s birthday, to which I had also been invited, maybe three hours from where I lived. I showed up a day late and a dollar short, and left too soon, and, because I knew he had come from the UK, on my way out asked him “so why are you here?” He said “this.” He seemed a real mensch.

[mcdonc (Chris McDonough)]

This is from David Mertz:

2025-01-25

I was honored to have known and loved Michael, at both some of his best and
worst times. I knew him in Python context, but also personally, before and
after the following anecdote.

I spoke with him regularly over video, over the last year or two, and he and I
co-organized (advised technically) PyCon MEA in Dubai, in 2021 and 2022. In
that first year, I spent much of the trip with him individually, including a
lovely dinner at the foot of Burj Khalifa.

In that conversation, as always, he was strident and opinionated, but had the
deepest respect for his friends, even in the moments of our disagreement. His
genuineness and compassion ran deep.

In this conversation, he had a sort of Burkean commitment to that saying about
clear ideas being expressible in a sentence or two. Hence he was dismissive of
the abstract political philosophy in which I did my dissertation work.

It’s a conversation I remember well with enormous fondness and a few eyerolls.
He was so earnest and impassioned… and often enough right.

As my pedagogical effort, I challenged Michael to explain, e.g. Python
metaclasses in a sentence. His admirable offering was “The class of an object
is object.”

This is indeed true, and once you unpack it indeed explains metaclasses. I
think the unpacking takes rather more sentences. And also that my
condensation of Historical Marxism as “History is the history of class
struggle” had the same quality.

Rest in Power my good friend.

[holdenweb (Steve Holden)]

I am terribly saddened by Michael Foord’s passing. He truly was one of a kind. He burst onto the Python scene like a bombshell, a vibrant personality full of ideas, communicative and highly creative. His complex personality was a result of complex circumstances, not all of them entirely pleasant but Michael managed to rise above them, or so it seemed. Although outwardly very different we both celebrated the fact that our differences made us more interesting to each other; every time we met he lightened my heart.

His technical abilities shone through clearly in his work, and his humanity shone equally brightly in his desire and ability to communicate to others what he had learned. Michael was not afraid to live life to the full, and some very happy experiences with Python friends involved him - most recently a dinner he organised for about a dozen friends at a Korean barbecue restaurant.

I am heartbroken that the pleasures of our recent re-acquaintance have been cut short so abruptly when I was looking forward to being pals into my dotage. The world is a less colourful place without him, and I will miss him like a brother.

[carljm (Carl Meyer)]

This is such sad news. Michael was an inspiration and encouragement to me in my earliest CPython contributions and PyCon talks, which I eagerly sought his feedback on; I too might not be here were it not for him.

Time spent with Michael was always memorable; never boring. He asked real questions and offered real thoughts. He prioritized truth over comfort. I’ll miss him.

I last had the chance to spend time with Michael at PyCon MEA in 2022. We visited the desert together, where I took this photo of him, greeting the desert with the whole-hearted exuberance he brought to so many occasions.

Rest well, Michael.

[okken (Brian Okken)]

Michael went from being one of my heros to being someone I respected as having a similar pragmatic testing and software development philosophy as myself. I wish I had been able to talk with him more than I did. But I’m grateful for the time I did get to talk with him.

I don’t know why I feel the need to write down this timeline of my interactions with Michael Foord. But I do. So here it is.

2012 - I start blogging about Software testing in Python. Someone tells me I gotta get my site listed on Planet Python, so I reach out and ask. It’s Michael Foord that replies with a “I’ve added your feed to the Planet Python. It will show up shortly.”

2013 and later - The more I write and research testing with Python, the more Michael Foord’s name shows up. He’s been involved with the unittest core library. He’s the original author of the Mock library, that gets pulled into core as unittest.mock. He’s involved with the Testing in Python mailing list. He’s been a part of the Testing BoF (Birds of a Feather) meetings at PyCon.

2015 - I start Test & Code podcast

2016 - I ask Michael Foord to be a guest on the show. He was working with Go at the time and recommended I reach out to Robert Collins, the maintainer of unittest at the time. I do, and Robert’s interview is episode 19

2017 - Michael writes “30 best practices for software development and testing”

2018 (I think) - The first time I see Michael Foord in person. I’m walking down a hallway at PyCon in Cleveland and I see him walking in a long black coat, a black hat, and goggles on the hat. He looks like he just came from a steam punk conference or something. Hey may have. I see he’s talking with a bunch of people and honestly, I’m too star struck to say hi. At least, that’s how I remember it.

2018 - I find the “30 best practices” artcile and love it, and think "here’s my opportunity to ask him on the show again. So I do. I ask Michael to come on the show to discuss the article, and he says yes. Yay!. However, scheduling conflicts on both his and my part push the interview to 2019.

2019 - We end up recording an interview at PyCon. However, it didn’t go well. I had a portable recording set up with a travel recorder and a couple of mics. I’d like to blame the equipment, but honestly, I don’t do very many in person interviews and also I’m still kinda freaking out that I’m talking to the Michael Foord in person and really the recording ends up sucking. I wonder if I still have the raw audio lying around somewhere. I’ll have to look. Anyway, I fess up to Michael that I don’t have enough usable audio and he agrees to reschedule.

2021 - We finally get an interview done and released. This is 5 years after I first tried to talk with him. But it ends up being a great talk. This is Test & Code episode 145, titled “For those about to mock”. At the end of the interview, I allude to us talking again. I really thought we would.

I’m very grateful that I did finally get an interview with Michael Foord done. Through his writing and though talking with him, I’ve learned a lot. He helped shape my ideas around software development and testing.

I’m grateful our paths crossed. I will miss him.

[willingc (Carol Willing)]

I remember Michael as warm, welcoming, and thoughtful. I’m grateful the kindness and testing knowledge that he shared with me in my early days of working with CPython. His colorful spirit will be missed. I’m so sorry for his family and friends. May their colorful memories of him bring some comfort to them.

[invisibleroads (Roy Hyunjin Han)]

I only met Michael Foord in passing. It saddens me to hear that he is gone. It was in Chicago perhaps 2008 and I had volunteered to introduce speakers to the audience before their talks. I asked Michael to pronounce his last name and he gave a talk on IronPython. He was jovial and gave a good talk. Chatting some time afterwards, I remember sensing that here was a person who had done difficult deeds but who was at the same time sociable, humble and accepting of others. He truly embodied the warm, welcoming and full heartedly off center community spirit that was PyCon. He had a great laugh that made you feel like you were part of the group.

[hynek (Hynek Schlawack)]

Like many here, I remember Michael as one of the warmest, most welcoming people when I got into the Python community. I have fond memories from Florence 2011/2012, where we stood in line for gelato and shot mock puns at each other or where he introduced me to his wife and first child. We only knew each other from IRC and Twitter, but he treated me like a friend from the get go.

I can’t say that I was as close with him like Nicholas, but whenever our paths crossed (and they did regularly) it was marked with warmth, joy, and goofiness.

He was one of the few people who combined kindness, strong principles, and curiosity into one package – something I strive for myself. We usually approached issues from very different angles, but the discussions were always cordial and we always both ended up with interesting insights from them. The last time I remember this happening was when he was camping on the floor in front of the first row of a talk/workshop of mine, participating in friendly heckling and the subsequent discussion. I’m grateful to have such a recent and strong memory of him.

We’ve lost a real one.

[The_dancefloor_destroyer (Benny Gray)]

My bestest friend in the whole wide world. Lile a brother and a father to me… left him on wednesday there was no issue with plans to meet again saturday.
Im numb

[nibrahim (Noufal Ibrahim)]

Michael was one of the keynote speakers at an early pycon India.

I have several fond memories of him which I’ll share below.

I was the one who recommended his name and invited him. He showed up significantly more muscular that when I met him at the pycon in Atlanta.

We had several long conversations about religion and spirituality and his passion never ceased to surprise me. I took him to see a large banyan tree outside Bangalore and we spent the time arguing whether navigation by gps or hippocampus was better and ended up missing our location.

On the way back, i took him to a restaurant i liked called Sufi. We spent a long time eating heartily and when my family called to ask why I was taking so long, he offered to call and make an excuse on my behalf.

He was a perfume enthusiast and i took a lot of Indian perfumes for him. In exchange, he gave me several which i used. I still have the cases from the ones he gave me.

A very passionate and wild charcter but a gentleman at heart. It was a privilege to know him and the world will be poorer for his loss.

RIP.

[dabeaz (David Beazley)]

I’m deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Michael. I can’t recall where we first met, but I have vivid memories of attending his PyCon UK 2008 tutorial where he rather gleefully had us build a Twitter client that he (rather presciently in hindsight) called “Twatter.” Ten years later, I found myself walking around Edinburgh castle with him discussing all things Python while I was attending EuroPython 2018.

Michael was a great teacher. Being in the teaching business myself, I would frequently refer people to him and even sent him off to various places to teach some my classes for than a decade. I must admit I always got a smile thinking about Michael showing up to bring his usual enthusiastic energy to some stuffy London-based trading company or something. They almost always asked for a return revisit though!

RIP Michael. You were one of the good ones!

[Cheukting (Cheuk Ting Ho)]

I remember first meeting Michael in EuroPython 2017 in Edinburgh. I remember after the conference closing, he was looking for friends to have dinner with and spend the evening together. His leather jacket, fedora and huge vaping pipe caught my attention and we ended up boding over whisky that evening. Since then, we have been good friends and he is always happy to help me with my Python questions. I was new to Python and eager to learn, he was the one who teaches me to build CPython from source. From him I have also heard a lot of funny stories about the community and him. He is alway open to share his personal stories with me. He had an exceptional life but he always have this iconic laughter and carefree attitude towards many things.

He is not just my Python friend, but my friend first and foremost. I was struggling with some personal issues around the time in 2017-2019 and Michael has been the person who always listened. Knowing that I will be alone, he invited me to visit him and his family over Christmas one year. We have also had some little adventures in other places in UK, sometimes with his family.

I will always remember his voice, laughter and the smoke from his vape. He was a special one in the community that is always accepting, kind and welcoming. I am sure he will be missed by many. Rest in peace.

[offby1 (Chris Rose)]

My fondest memory of Michael comes from the Whisky BoF at the first Cleveland PyCon; we were concerned about noise – it turns out that exuberant and tipsy pythonistas are not compatible with hotel noise expectations! – and he made the brilliant suggestion that we turn the BoF into a storytelling session, with one person speaking and the rest just sipping and listening… it was something truly special, and I’ve always treasured the memory of a unique experience surrounded by already- and not-yet- friends telling tales and making toasts.

I used his code, sure, but it’s the person I’ll miss.

[diegor (Diego Russo)]

I’ve been attending EuroPython since 2011, but for life reasons, I’ve never met or interacted with Michael, but I think I have scattered memories of him during these conferences.

Reading all your nice words is enough to understand what a great person he was and what huge impact he had on the community, both technically, personally, and socially.
These days, I’ve been screening EuroPython 2025 proposals and realised that his name is on the list. This has really hit me straight into the heart with huge sadness, as we won’t see him at the conference

I didn’t know you, but thanks for the wonderful community you helped build and the great legacy you left us.