For the next 30 days, a few billion of you will get an extra header in honor of Eric Binnion. The code in Nginx to do this is poetic:
add_header X-Remembering "Eric Binnion <https://friendsofericbinnion.wordpress.com/>" always;
Our design team will make that less AI and more humane in the coming days.
Automattic.com will have a mourning band for 30 days.
Eric was the 21st recipient of the Distinguished Janitor Award, Automattic’s highest honor, and in our hangs the last few months we’ve been talking about how to redefine and evolve it, which will happen internally at Automattic. One of the ideas was for the award to come with a physical memento, an etched tungsten cube. I don’t have many words so I’ll share something I wrote to Eric a few months ago when I gave him my cube when he was going through chemo.
Two Totems To Take With You
The first is a tungsten cube I keep on my desk. Its weight will surprise you, but tungsten is singular in having the highest melting point of any metal. That represents one of the things I admire most about you.
Tungsten has an atomic number of 74, its symbol is W, and it’s also known as wolfram.
My next post I’ve had in drafts for a while so please try to imagine me happy and promotional when reading it, but otherwise, I’m wrecked. Just going to soldier through because that’s what Eric always did.
