I’m also shocked to hear the news. I was lucky enough to work with Michael at Resolver, and counted him as amongst the dearest of friends. It’s clear a great many people feel similarly.
I last saw him when he was able to come visit me here in Minnesota, where we took him out canoeing, which he engaged with gamely in his usual generous, boisterous style, even though the weather wasn’t perfect for it. I have long regretted that I declined to join him on an overnight vision quest of sorts that night, having the irksome ties of professional and domestic duties the next day, and now I’ll never be able to take him up on such an offer again. An unstoppable force is gone from the world.
I first met Michael in person at the PyCon 2011 Language Summit. For more than a decade, my preferred profile pic for programming related accounts was cropped from a photo Michael took at that event.
The picture above isn’t that one. Instead, it’s from the final day of the sprints a week later, when Michael was amongst the last holdouts continuing to enjoy the company of his fellow Python community members.
No matter how much time passed between events, catching up with Michael always felt like no time had passed at all.
Hearing about Micheal passing brings me great sadness, as I consider him a dear friend. I had shared a lot with Michael, learned from him, and I will remember him fondly. We had great time, both while working together at Canonical, and also while having fun.
We met while working on Juju and were both learning Golang at the time, switching from Python. It was both an interesting challenge, and great opportunity to work with some great people like William Reade,Tim Penhey, John Meinel, Andrew Wilkins, Barry Warsaw, and many others. Our team was a close-nit one, we went on a lot of sprints (work trips across the world in Canonical) together.
I remember one very memorable trip to Las Vegas, where Michael and I went to a shooting range and had my first and only time holding and shooting AK47 and M16 It was lots of fun, and Michael particularly enjoyed it!
We talked a lot about the past, both about mistakes and lessons learned, he was always helpful with some wisdom or advise when I needed it. We also met his family too. I remember a funny moment at one EuroPython conference, after the talks we went to have some lunch and while talking my mom mentioned something about “be careful the chilly might be too hot for Ben” or something, and Michael immediately dipped a finger in the chilly sauce and gave Ben a taste of it, and he made a funny surprised face.
Michael helped me with my anxiety before speaking publicly and we co-hosted a talk once, and gave me the confidence to present several times at EuroPython, which also become a source of many friends and fond memories!
I’m absolutely gutted. I had the pleasure of hanging out with Michael at countless PyCon events over the years, and every time he was a vibrant, funny, warm, and encouraging soul. I can remember a particularly lively evening at a (in)famous BoF session that ran late into the night. So many joyful laughs!
Michael’s impact on the Python community cannot be overstated. He was incredibly approachable, and his enthusiasm was magnetic. Many developers in the Python community owe him a debt of gratitude for encouraging them to join the fold.
Rest in peace, Michael. You will be missed, but the mark you made will endure for many years.
I particularly remember his boundless optimism even in the face of a (putting it mildly) complicated personal history. 2025 is not starting out well :(. I’ve informed facebook to put his account into ‘memorial’ status, so hopefully, for those of us for whom memory of the deceased is painful, his recent posts will stop getting put into peoples feeds soon.
In recent years our interactions were all digital, and mostly in the context of terrible memes on Facebook. I will miss those interactions. And the memes.
I just posted some words on Reddit about Michael, but wanted to repost here:
Michael was a colleague and good friend when we worked together at Canonical (starting in 2011). I actually got the job after chatting with him on Twitter when he referred me to his boss.
We shared hotel rooms several times during Ubuntu Summits and other company meetings. He would basically take over the room and lay around hacking on his weird Kinesis keyboard. He also liked to order odd stuff from Amazon that wasn’t available in his home country and have it sent to my house, so I would have to bring an extra bag on trips to deliver stuff for him. I have great memories of sharing meals and exploring Budapest with him on my first work trip. We both worked remote, but he was my closest friend at work. We developed a UI testing framework together.
I first met Michael in person at PyCon Atlanta (2010?), where he gave a talk on the mock module he developed (now part of the Python standard library). He was a wizard with Python, especially in regards to testing. He was responsible for the improvements in the standard library’s unittest module that were delivered in Python 2.7 and 3.2 (he also maintained the old unittest2 package that was later folded into the standard library).
He was a great guy and quite a character. We had many deep discussions about life, programming, and cultural differences between the UK and USA (I’m American, he’s English). I usually keep to myself, so it was rare for me to engage like that. He was also fond of off-color jokes and took many friendly jabs at my ethnicity.
He was affectionately known as “Fuzzyman”. I’ll miss you old friend… RIP.
I had the joy of working with Michael at Resolver. We’d get into rambling probably-quite-annoying-to-listen-to philosophical arguments while waiting for test runs to finish, although they pretty regularly spilled over into the time after (sorry Giles).
He eventually convinced me to help him write IronPython in Action, which was a great thing to have done, even though I found actually doing my small part like pulling teeth. I always admired Michael’s tremendous energy and talent for communicating his ideas.
Just before I left London I went up to visit him in Northampton, ostensibly to work (we were both at Canonical at that point) but mostly just to mess around with his 3dTV and watch The Big Lebowski and go on a vision quest and chat. It was magic.
I was fortunate to meet Michael at the 2019 core developer sprint at Bloomberg, London. He gave a lot of insights about the design decisions in Mock and its internals. He also helped with the design discussions of AsyncMock and reviewing PRs for mock. The sprint gives me fond memories of meeting the mock team Michael, Chris, Lisa and Mario along with other core developers before I joined. He was welcoming and witty with words throughout the sprint. His presence will be missed.
I am not a Python coder. I met Michael at a couple of EuroPython events held in the Midlands when I was wrangling t-shits, mugs and reception as a volunteer. I would just like to tell his children he was a lovely man. I reached out to him once for help and he responded with support. RIP Michael.
I’ve been loving everyone’s Michael|Fuzzyman|voidspace memories here. Thanks for sharing!
When I heard about Michael’s passing, I… really didn’t have words. He was important to me. I’m going to miss him. I was hoping to finally be able to see him again this year, lovely unique quirks and all.
It was that PyCon US 2008 experience with our first ever “language summit” (whatever we called it then) that cemented a very team like feeling for me towards many other core devs and the PSF as a whole. Prior to that, I’d been noodling away on things on my own, merely as someone who had the responsibility of a commit bit but without really feeling connected to a whole. Michael was welcoming and really helped bring me into the fold.
I’ll never forget him helping out when I came along proposing to contribute a pile of improvements to the unittest module that my employer had accumulated. I showed them to Michael during the sprint and instead of taking them as is or dismissing them, he - being a pro-testing - was inspired to realize, “we can do this even better!” and built upon them such that we’d autodetect common assertEqual scenarios to automagically use more friendly diagnostic outputs of the type, sequence, or multi-line specific forms of the added unittest.TestCase.assert* methods.
These thankfully made it into 2.7. At future sprints working on raising the ease of testing bar and correcting past unittest and mock oops-in-hindsight mistakes was always something I was happy to sync up with Michael on to make a positive software impact on the world.
I also recall taking him for a tour/lunch visit to my work campus after the Santa Clara PyCon US 2012 when, in an unplanned coincidence, we had posters up in the bathrooms - not created by me - promoting the use of mock instead of past mocking libraries atrocities. He was estatic for a little esoteric fame and posted a photo of it on a former social network. Proof that his work (we were just getting mock into the standard library at the time) was widely appreciated.
Test on old buddy. No mock can ever replace you. It turns out that voidspace was a prescient name for that hole in our hearts.
Hi Carl, I am Michael’s brother, David. Thank you so much for your kind words. We, his family and close friends, absolutely love this photo of him. Firstly, can you tell me more about its provenance, like location and surrounding events? Also, please may we use this at his funeral? Thank you in advance, David.
Thank you, David. I am so sorry for your loss. I would love if this photo could be part of remembering and honoring Michael’s life at his funeral; you are more than welcome to use it.
Michael and I were both speakers at PyCon Middle East and Africa in Dubai in Oct 2022. After the conference we and a couple other speakers decided to take a tour of the desert outside the city. Michael suggested that we take photos of each other leaping from the top of a sand dune, in such a way that the dune itself wouldn’t be visible. I took this photo of Michael and sent it to him. I think that’s pretty much the whole story of the photo! The whole afternoon/evening was a lovely time, full of interesting conversation; I remember it well.
It was lots of fun, and Michael particularly enjoyed it!
Rest easy!
- was inspired to realize, “we can do this even better!” and built upon them such that we’d autodetect common 