First off, Ilmo would be upset. Not because of the obvious, but because his favorite way of communicating was with imagery, which a text box entry field does not allow. Every time he presented at work, it would be a visual fantasia, marrying a theme to a highly technical and esoteric idea that he would turn into an allegory. Think The Little Mermaid meets users’ impressions of self-driving cars, a narrated story. In our long chat thread, he would cut sad moments with a well-placed meme.

::Thanks Obama::

Second, this makes R, our shared first language, become one step closer to obsolete. Fun fact: Ilmo is the only researcher who was so good at R he could teach the entire class to the ‘technical’ data scientists. He had a deep and broad body of knowledge which he was generous in sharing, both in readouts of customer calls to broad audiences (with memes) and in one-on-one conversations.

Thirdly, Ilmo was meticulous, but in unusual ways. He was always looking for what one could call ‘wine arbitrage.’ As my frequent compatriot at Friday happy hours in Menlo Park, he would carefully scan each available wine bottle and find the highest-rated wine on a Likert scale to select. Normally, the wines for the masses were the ‘cheap stuff’ under $25-30 a bottle, but at his new employer, his wine-scanner detective eye found a $75 bottle, which he, being a point-snob, had to try.

:: score, napolean dynamite::
Lastly, I know Ilmo was a dedicated and encouraging dad. As a new father, he encouraged me by saying that it would get better. These are words I will have to shoulder now as I am majorly bummed to not get any more Giphy pictures from one of my favorites.

Matthew F