[afnog] Remembering apb (was: In Memoriam: Alan Barrett

[Geert Jan de Groot]

Hello,

Today's sad news came as a total shock to me and first of all, I would 
like to offer my condolences to his family, friends and the Internet 
community.

I wonder if it makes sense to share a few stories to remember Alan in 
his role as instructor.

I met apb (his login, but also his nickname) in 1994. Between 1993 and 
2000, the Internet Society had an annual conference and the week before 
the conference, ISOC would organize workshops to bring knowledge about 
Internet technology to people from places that would benefit from our 
workshops.
These were intense hands-on workshops, not slide-slapping but intense 
exercises to make people use what they just learned and they ran the 
days till deep in the night.

We sometimes had challenges to build the setup for the workshops (and, 
in some cases, the conference itself) and I remember apb using quite 
some "interesting" ways to make things work.

It was also during these conferences I hear apb speak about his ideas 
for a regional Internet registry for Africa, what became later AfriNIC.
While we were having fun doing technical stuff, I remember in addition 
to the workshop stuff he got very busy at times on his regional registry 
plans. And all of this next to his ISP work and later, his other work.

With the ISOC workshops ending in 2000, there was another initiative 
starting to use the same model to do workshops for the African ISP 
community in Africa under the AfNOG umbrella.
We had worked together for some years already and he called me to ask 
whether I'd be interested to join an effort to do workshops in Africa 
and this was the start of the AfNOG workshops.

For a number of reasons, doing workshops in Africa brought many new 
challenges and for instance, I remember the day we decided to remove a 
VSAT-dish and re-install it, this time upside-down (literally!) to work 
around some limitations the meeting venue had brought us to get our 
Internet working.
See 
https://www.ws.afnog.org/afnog2007/pictures/mtinka/16th-april-monday/index.html 
for some pictures of apb doing engineer work on a very hot hotel roof 
mid-day in Abuja.
No challenge was too big and ingenuity had a very high level; we also 
had a lot of fun doing this.

Alan was excellent, excellent in automating what could be automated. 
Preparing workshop exercises could be quite intensive, apb would not 
rest until an exercise was fully automated, and "make" would generate 
all the instructions, all the handouts and all the tools for an 
exercise. He could spend many hours on this, but "if it is done right, 
then we don't need to worry about it". Some of his exercise tools have 
been used for 15 years or so.

With the workshops, you may know that we handed out out training 
materials and in order to do so, Alan came with the idea to create a 
CDrom (later: USB stick) with all the training materials on them so the 
workshops could be reproduced and shared.
Alan worked a lot on automating the content generation (again: 
"automating all that can be automated"): one would just upload the 
materials and indexing and linking was done automatically. More 
important, his tooling also made lists of broken links and the like and 
he worked with the people who had trouble to deliver their materials for 
the CDrom / USB stick / website.
At the end of workshop week, after an intense week of preparing training 
materials, doing training, doing exercises and the rest, with very 
little sleep, we'd only have to tell his tools "next build run is the 
last one, please" and have all the materials ready, master-images 
created, for distribution after his tools finished the final run.

The workshop-materials websites https://www.ws.afnog.org and 
https://www.isocws.isoc.org were built with his tools.

Alan also had excellent political skills and when workshop things didn't 
go the way we wanted, his steps to fix things were invaluable to the 
instructor team.

In later years, when he took up his job of CEO of AfriNIC, we saw that 
his workload was intense, very intense, and he was juggling to do the 
workshop things he liked to do next to the responsibilities that came 
with his official role.

In 2019 he stepped down as AfriNIC CEO and we all saw that his work has 
had a huge impact on him. I know his life changed quite a bit after 
that; because of things like Corona stopping the classic workshops our 
contacts became less, though I heard he had changed his life and was 
doing well.

Alan, memories of us working together brings smiles and a lot of 
sadness. May your family find the strength to overcome the loss. We all 
miss you!

Geert Jan