A remembrance of Matthew S. Trout (mst)

I found out last night. I miss Matt incredibly. I spent around a decade of my life constantly interacting with (using, contributing to, and providing free support for) stuff he wrote, including Catalyst (which he didn’t originate but was the main drive of for a long time), DBIC, Web::Simple, Moo, Fatpack, and local::lib. He was a mad genius in all of the best ways (and yes, some of the worst ways). He was creative, passionate, and not above tweaking a few noses. He created Devel::Declare, which was a gross hack — one might say deliberately offensive in its mucking about in the internals — because he knew that its very existence would drive the creation of a core language feature to replace it. His presence made people excited to do cool things. In person, he lit up a room. At conferences he was the semi-official “hallway track coordinator” and set out to connect people who might never have talked to each other.

And yeah, he could be incredibly pissy, especially towards people who “just didn’t get it”, but I’ll be an apologist here because it’s something I relate to all too well. It always came from that place of really passionately caring about something and just wanting things to be right. He was deconstructing a problem, and sometimes a few human beings got deconstructed along the way. I won’t say that was right, but I know it wasn’t wanton cruelty. Having been so close to his projects, I often had the chance, when he was laying into a helpless newbie a little too hard, to say “hey mst, back off, I got this one, I think I know what they’re on about” — and he would. Because his bitchiness at “why can’t this muppet see I’m just trying to help them and why can’t they give me a straight answer?” would give way to “oh thank god, maybe someone else can sort this mess out” and he’d be perfectly reasonable again.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt this conflicted about a person. When they were handing out flaws mst jumped the queue. Like the OP says, he acknowledged all of them, and he wasn’t proud of them. He accepted them, though, as a sort of immutable fact of his being. He’d have been the first one to describe himself as a bastard, and it would be hard to disagree with that assessment if you didn’t know how hard he worked and how much he cared about people underneath it all. He really did want to be a force for good, and to leave things better than he found them. Even if nature had only furnished him with a chainsaw.

I particularly remember a conversation we had when I told him I’d pulled his freenode o:line after a particularly toxic episode – he wasn’t angry, as I’d expected. He wasn’t bitter at all. He knew his personality meant it had to happen. We both thought we’d laugh about it over a pint one day. I guess it wasn’t to be. RIP, Matt.

I wasn’t expecting that. Neither the news or the frank honesty of this remembrance. I intersected with Matt at a particular series of conferences, got a bad feeling from a limited interaction and avoided him afterwards. Reading the background he was quite likely drunk all the times we were in vicinity. RIP

I don’t think I ever crossed paths with Matt - I stopped writing perl in the 90s.

Thai remembrance and the comments make me reflect on the myself, and others I know. It feels like such a sad waste when negative aspects of our personality or brain chemistry can get in the way of our work and ideas being valuable and useful. I don’t think it’s something that can be “fixed” as a whole, but something we all have to try to work on, as it sounds like Matt was trying to do.

RIP.