Friday, July 27 marked Brendan McLoughlin’s final day at Bocoup. Brendan (better known around the web as “bmac”) joined us way back in 2013, so there’s a lot to say about his contribution to our company. The most important thing to know about Brendan’s style (and probably the first thing you’d notice when working with him) is his unparalleled dedication. A self-motivated commitment to excellence has made him an asset to his colleagues in more ways than one.
The hallmark of Brendan’s time here has been dependability. He provided his expertise on some of our longest-running projects. He quickly became a critical member on the teams that were lucky enough to have him, coupling solid technical expertise with a knack for project management. We came to expect light signs of separation anxiety from our clients each time Brendan handed off his final deliverables. Fortunately for the web, Brendan’s stunning consistency carried over into his open source contributions. He has maintained Ember Data–a critical component of the massively popular Ember.js framework–for years. If you’re using Ember today, then it’s almost certain that a piece of your app has been vetted by bmac.
That internal drive hasn’t just guided his project work; it’s been the impetus for Brendan’s professional growth. He’s always got his nose (or ears) in one technical book or another, studying all sorts of practical topics from the security model of the web, philosophies about software testing, and the design and implementation of algorithms. As any experienced web developer can tell you, there’s been a lot of churn in the tooling for front-end applications over the past 5 years. Brendan has taken all of this in stride: he was teaching us about Knockout.js in 2013, leading development in Ember.js in 2015, and giving conference talks on React in 2017 (although that recording looks like it was recorded in 1991). Like some kind of open web magician, he’d often surprise us with the technology he pulled out of his hat. One afternoon, he presented a text editor he was building in Rust. Even on his very last day at Bocoup, he surprised us by solving a problem with the up-and-coming Docker Swarm.
We’ll miss Brendan for his dedication. We’ll also miss Brendan for his occasional gift of fantastic cupcakes. Most of all, though, we’ll miss Brendan for his unassuming and positive demeanor. For all his amazing technical achievements, Brendan’s personality has been his most important contribution to Bocoup. Thanks for that, bmac, and please don’t forget to visit once in a while.
