Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial

Malcolm Tredinnick wasn't just a Django core developer and reviewer of the original Two Scoops of Django. To us, he was much, much more.

Daniel had worked with Malcolm Tredinnick in the summer of 2010, and we first met him in person at DjangoCon 2010. He was funny and charming, sharply opinionated but always a gentleman; we instantly became close friends.

In 2012, when we co-organized the first PyCon Philippines as soon as we told him about it, Malcolm instantly declared he was coming. He gave two memorable talks and ran an impromptu all-day Django tutorial. He also pushed and encouraged the local community to work on Filipino language translations for Django, including Tagalog, Tausig, Cebuano, and more.

After the conference, we started working on a book about Django best practices. We gathered friends and colleagues to help us as technical reviewers. Malcolm Tredinnick became the most active of them. He was our mentor and forced us to dig deeper and work harder. He did this while working a day job as the leader of a combined Rails and Haskell team; Malcolm was a true programming language polyglot.

For our book, he provided so much assistance and guidance we tried to figure out a way to include him in the author credits. When we told him about our dilemma, he laughed it off saying, "For a book called 'Two Scoops', you can't have three authors." We suggested he share credit with us on a second book, and he refused, saying he preferred to just comment on our work. He said that he wanted people to have proper references, and for him, simply reviewing our work was contributing to the greater good. Eventually the two of us quietly planned to somehow coerce him into being a co-author on a future work.

After months of effort, we released the first iteration on January 17th, 2013. Malcolm stepped back from the project, but we stayed in touch. Since Malcolm was unable to attend PyCon US 2013 we weren't sure when we would meet him again.

Two months later, on March 17th, 2013, Malcolm passed away.

We knew Malcolm for less than three years and yet he made an incredible difference in our lives. We've heard many similar stories in the community about Malcolm; He was a friend and mentor to countless others around the world. His last lesson to us went beyond code or writing, he taught us to never take for granted friends, family, mentors, and teachers.

Helping the Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial

Malcolm shared his gifts with us, and we are returning that favor to the world. We frequently give to various non-profit software engineer-focused charities and instruction efforts around the world.

In addition to our contributions, the Django Software Foundation issues the annual Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial Prize to the person who best exemplifies Malcolm's work. You can donate to this organization which operates in Malcolm's spirit through the Django Software Foundation's donation page.