Thank you, Nathan!

Monday, April 12, 2021 at 5:41 PM UTC

Today we mourn for one of our members of the community (aka the Yellow bubble),

Nathan T. Freeman.

If you are working in the Notes/Domino area for some years you definitely came across this name. Nathan was one of the busiest developers for decades, always exploring the borders of Notes and Domino and way beyond.

He was one of the founders of OpenNTF, the open-source platform for Notes and Domino enthusiasts. OpenNTF will celebrate the 20th birthday this December - alas, without having him with us.

I don't know any details except it happened all of a sudden, at least for us outside his family and friend's circle, and to be honest: this is not our business. I can only say that I am stunned.

Bob Kadrie, a close friend of him and partner of RedPill shared a campaign to support him and his family due to his serious health condition and everything that comes along with that on Saturday evening. It was shared over the community within minutes and the first goal was reached within less than 24 hours. We again learned about his condition from updates that Bob posted - and they weren't positive. This Monday morning (European time) we had to read the terrible news about his passing away.

The campaign is still active and if you want to support his family during these rough times ahead, if you ever benefitted from Nathan's work during the decades or if you just want to express your respect then please consider to donate what you can afford: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ntf-needs-your-help

It was in 2015 right before I joined We4IT when I was able to attend 2 user group conferences in a single week, ICS.UG and Engage. Before that time I only "knew" about the VIP of the Yello-sphere by reading blog posts etc. but I never had a chance to meet one of them in person. That time I got the full package and Nathan was amongst of them. Holy moly! I knew him from his blog posts, from OpenNTF, from contributions to various OpenNTF projects and later from the OpenNTF board calls of course.

He was a very funny guy (funny if you like sarcasm) and sometimes I had trouble to follow his words and jokes as they were so deep, especially for me as a non-native English speaker. We had a great time though in Bremen, Gent and in Eindhoven one year later. He was with us at the famous Lotus Beer Bus ride from Bremen to Gent (which took about 7 hours) including music and a bar on wheels. The remarkable part was that we had a detour especially for him in the Netherlands to aim for a super market as the bus didn't have Tequila on board so we stopped in a small village, he entered the super market and grabbed some for the rest of our tour - so why not?

His sessions about and contributions to the OpenNTF Domino API and the GraphNSF stuff inspired me to present sessions about both at other user group events afterwards such as SUTOL and EntwicklerCamp to spread the word.

Sometimes there are just a few moments, some simple things needed for that a person has an impact on you. Farewell, Nathan, you will be missed.