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

[Lucy Lynch]

Such a sad day. Alan was a stalwart not just of the African Internet community but of the real (big I) Internet as a whole. I’ll add two personal memories that haven’t been touched on yet:

That tiny smile that always seemed like both an internal laugh at this absurd world and a shared joke.

That zen like ability to handle any question not with a pat answer but with another question that lead you to your own best answer. 

Sensi - you are missed already.

Lucy

> On May 28, 2026, at 11:00 AM, Geert Jan de Groot <geertj at nsrc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
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