Tribute to a Real Mensch

After a difficult and courageous battle with pancreatic cancer, my friend David Lawrence Hoffman passed away peacefully on Dec. 15, 2018 [1]. Dave had been a positive light in my life (and so many others) for many years. Along with all of Dave’s many friends, we had been acutely aware that this day was coming (“pancreatic cancer is devilishly tricky,” he had written to me soon after his diagnosis). Nevertheless, the days since his death have been very difficult and deeply sad. With Dave’s passing, I have a sense that I lost a really special friend, a kindred spirit and a fellow data geek (though he had been a full-stack engineer for nearly 30 years, much of Dave’s work had centered around problems of data engineering).

If given the opportunity, Dave would probably chastise me a bit for making such a big deal about his passing. In this imaginary conversation, I would respond by pointing out that there was much about him that was rare, and that it is totally appropriate that both his life and his career should be celebrated.

Given that there are nearly 800,000 people working in the technology industry here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the a priori chances of Dave and I meeting were very slim, especially since we had not gone to school together nor worked at the same company. We met only because Jennifer, my girlfriend at the time and now my wife, literally ran into Dave when they found themselves jogging in opposite directions on the same loop trail. They had only spoken once before, and no longer worked at the same company as Jennifer had recently left for a new job. But Dave recognized Jennifer, greeted her warmly, introduced himself, and eventually turned around and slowed down his pace so that he could continue the conversation while she finished her run.

This simple story (“classic Dave,” his friends would tell you) reveals much about him, including his openness and friendliness, his gift for conversation and his cardiovascular capacity. (Jennifer reported being very short of breath after having to run and talk with Dave at the same time!) 

Start of a Long Friendship

This chance encounter was the start of our long friendship with Dave. Among the favorite early memories: company parties, New Year’s Eve celebrations, hours spent spinning vinyl and sharing stories, jogging in the pouring rain, long conversations in our backyard in San Francisco, and dancing on the beach the night before Jennifer and I were married. Even though I saw Dave a bit less often once we became parents, our time together was always joyful and memorable. He was a regular attendee at our annual holiday party, an enthusiastic and speedy member of my team for the 200-mile relay race from Calistoga to Santa Cruz, and a great companion for various ballgames, concerts and movies.

Regardless of how long it had been since we had seen each other, he was always truly present when we were together. He had so many passions – technology, science, art, friends, travel, music, fitness, philosophy and personal growth – and his enthusiasm for all of them was often very infectious. He was a great listener who was inevitably attentive, curious and engaged. He was also often pleasantly neurotic and inevitably very funny.

Professionally, Dave’s distinguished career included stints with a hardware company (Sun Microsystems), a consumer technology vendor (Digital Video Systems), an Internet startup (GetThere.com), a mobile software firm (Good Technology) and a network security software company (Skyhigh Networks). Unlike many software developers, Dave made the conscious choice to stay in hands-on technical roles throughout his career, a choice that required him to constantly be learning new technologies and tools, new development practices and protocols, new contextual languages and use cases, and so much more.

During the second half of his career, Dave was engaged in several complex data science projects, including the development of a back-end machine learning pipeline and the implementation of big data analysis platform to support rapid server scalability. Despite having no academic training in modeling and data analysis, he was always enthusiastic about having the chance to learn, taking several courses on Coursera and asking lots of questions of his colleagues.

In this, as in all things Dave was a quick study. Whenever we discussed his work, I always marveled at how deeply he understood not only the work that he did but also how his contributions fit into a broader context. Jason Kim, a former coworker of Dave’s, vividly recalls his work developing one of the very first XML-based APIs that allowed other developers to access data from GetThere.com’s application. “Dave’s code was really clean, but that was just part of the story,” Jason says. “He had also thought long and hard about the specific issues that users of the API were likely to encounter and addressed them directly in both his design and his documentation.”

Jason also observes that this was typical of Dave, not only because of his outside interests in art and writing, but also because he was such a well-rounded and empathetic person that thinking about others came so naturally to him. Similarly, in a recent conversation, longtime colleague Thyag Thyagarajan recalls Dave’s skill in troubleshooting counterintuitive machine learning model results, as he tenaciously sorted through potential root causes to expose coding errors and/or new discoveries. 

Person of Integrity and Honor

In a word, Dave was a “mensch,” a Yiddish term that means “a person of integrity and honor.” For those not familiar with this term, Yiddish scholar Leo Rosten has written that a mensch is “someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being ‘a real mensch’ is nothing less than character, rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible and decorous.” Wikipedia adds that “this term is used as a high compliment, implying the rarity and value of that individual’s qualities.”

Dave’s passing has left me (and virtually everyone who knew him) with a deep sense of sadness. But there is comfort in knowing how much he loved his family, how committed he was to his work and his many other interests, and how much he valued and appreciated his friends and colleagues. Through our joyful memories of him, and through the way in which he inspired each of us to be more mensch-like, we must take some solace in knowing his spirit will live on for a very long time.

Reference

1. https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/mercurynews/obituary.aspx?n=david-hoffman&pid=191054945&fhid=6435