Toby Goodwin (1968-2018)

At Mythic Beasts we rotate staff members around different roles. This is to protect the company from the unlikely event that a staff member is abducted by aliens and someone else has to take over at short notice.

With great sadness we have to report that Toby Goodwin, our first full time employee was not abducted by aliens. Much worse, he had an undiagnosed asymptomatic heart problem and passed away unexpectedly and painlessly last week.

Back in 2010 Toby had been running a bookshop in Cambridge with a quirky and eclectic selection of books. That business had come to an end and Toby was wondering about dusting off his UNIX skills and looking for work. At the same time Mythic Beasts had grown too large for the two then-active founders to effectively keep up and after an interview over a beer in the Devonshire Arms, Toby joined Mythic Beasts.

We didn’t initially realise how lucky we were because Toby had the perfect blend of skills. An experienced UNIX hacker from his days at Cygwin, he quickly figured out most of the technical operations to keep Mythic running. Meanwhile his experience at the bookshop gave him incredible patience and empathy for confused customers. He took it on himself to continuously improve our operations introducing radical new ideas like helper scripts having consistent names to make them easy to find, continuous integration and automated testing of our control panel.

Toby implemented the bulk of our managed server update system. When he started, we had tens of managed customers and updating packages was starting to become time consuming. Gradually this became a highly reliable and flexible system which means we can audit and update thousands of servers quickly and efficiently, whilst correctly notifying every affected customer in a timely fashion. Toby was always modest about his achievements and never suffered from being defensive about his code. When our summer students discovered a significant security flaw in a piece of configuration, he congratulated them and worked with them to resolve it quickly.

After working with us for a few years in Cambridge, Toby met Heather and moved with her to her native Scotland where they married and brought into the world a highly reliable early morning alarm clock called Zachary. Toby would regularly work early in the morning before taking some time out to deliver Zachary to nursery or work with him on significant structural engineering projects.

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In addition to being a skilled software developer, Toby was also a brilliant railway engineer in the face of feline opposition.

Goodnight Toby. We’ll miss you.