William Zola

[Asya Kamsky]

There is no easy way to tell you this.

Yesterday morning William Zola, our admired and respected friend and colleague, unexpectedly passed away from natural causes.

Words cannot begin to convey the sense of loss all of us feel right now. 

William loved being part of this community.   We will miss his insightful contributions here, and on a personal note, I will miss my friend more than I can say.

Asya

[Stephen Steneker]

I also wanted to share a few words about William. He was an inspirational colleague & friend, and always provided measured advice.

William played a vital role in establishing, nurturing, and mentoring the global MongoDB support team. He loved to educate, mentor, and solve challenging problems of both a technical nature and human nature. William developed the standard Customer Skills and Customer Diagnostics training courses which new technical hires now take as part of their induction at MongoDB, and his advice permeates our support culture. Some of us called him the "Customer Whisperer"; he cheekily called himself "The Old Fogey" aka a "Bad-Ass Unicorn".

If you would like to rediscover some of William's public contributions (aside from the 430+ posts in this group), see:

 - His blog: http://www.badassunicorn.org

 - StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/users/1408889/william-z

 - The (Only) Three Reasons for Slow MongoDB Performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJFXM6tZJqg

I miss him dearly :(

Take care,

Stephen

[s.molinari]

Holy cow. That is just really sad for me to hear. If ever there was a great evangelist and supporter of MongoDB, it was William. I didn't know him personally, but I knew from his way of posting and helping here in the user community, he will be a highly missed team member and person in general.

Scott

[Albert Kam]

This is saddenning. My deepest condolences for the MongoDB team.

Respectfully,

Albert Kam

On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 3:43 PM, s.molinari <scottam...@googlemail.com> wrote:

Holy cow. That is just really sad for me to hear. If ever there was a great evangelist and supporter of MongoDB, it was William. I didn't know him personally, but I knew from his way of posting and helping here in the user community, he will be a highly missed team member and person in general.

Scott

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--
Do not pursue the past. Do not lose yourself in the future.
The past no longer is. The future has not yet come.
Looking deeply at life as it is in the very here and now,
the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom.
(Thich Nhat Hanh)

[Sam Millman]

Sorry to hear that, William was an excellent member of this community, even when the asker seemed, like me, a complete idiot he would see it through to the end.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mongodb-user/CAMT20g_jGeUhOHs0mZqPC-LfozZdicLQQDuNsj21m%2Bp1xpbeww%40mail.gmail.com.

[s.molinari]

Yep! I agree, because I know this first hand. I was one of the idiots he helped. I am no longer an idiot anymore thanks to William and the other great MongoDB support staff here.

Scott

[Zohar Hirshfeld]

 I am very sad to hear that. William was such a nice guy!