I met Ilmo while in my early days of my career at Sony PlayStation, and we quite quickly became allies in our quest to standardise some of the vast amounts of information flowing through our office. It was so long ago, that he had yet to adopt the last name which we all now know him by. When he changed his last name, he told me, I didn’t get to choose my last name previously, so why not make it something epic? I didn’t know that Van Der Löwe, meant “From the Lion”. But it fit perfectly to him.

I learned from Ilmo that despite both of us not being full-time employees, or even expected to stay beyond our weekly, or even daily goals of correcting and translating UI strings, there was a greater interest in always leaving something tidier than you found it. Metaphorically speaking of course, but digital files, in those days passed around from folder to folder, quickly piled up or became obsolete. Ilmo and I embarked on the task of making this information easier to digest, and the first project that I remember him passionately working on was to create a blog for all the daily translators that stopped by the office. There everyone would know who was in that day, what they would be working on, and more importantly, what they should aim to accomplish. While perhaps nowadays in our vast mess of Slacks, Zooms, Cloud Translations, the idea of sharing is almost beyond ingrained into our daily lives, in those days, corporate machinery moved slower, with printed powerpoint presentations and conference calls being the norm. Ilmo always thought ahead of what was available, to make something which was not there before, appear.

Since then, I’ve always aimed to make even the smallest contributions seen, that those who participate in the machinery of providing digital information to the masses seen by those who don’t know they exist. Ilmo taught me the power of communication, of giving people a platform to be heard, of making things “nifty”.

I append a picture of Tom (our manager at Sony), myself and Ilmo the day I visited them at Google before I moved to Portland to embark on a new adventure, sadly, now it is the last time that I got to spend time physical space with the wonderful person, Ilmo.

Jesse