"Goodwill", key member of the SoCal Python Community has passed away

Summary

In Memoriam: Michael In early May of 2025, the long-standing SoCal Python organizer Michael Ryabushkin—known to many as goodwill—passed away. As possibly the person most responsible for years of thriving of the group and its surrounding community, he had an impact on many of us, both professionally and personally. In light of that, this page is a collection of in memoriam messages submitted through this form. If you would like to share your memories of Michael, please do the same. Michael and I met in 2017, when I started attending SoCal Python meetups. Pretty soon he brought me under his wing as a co-organizer, and over the ensuing years we and others organized many SoCal Python events together, and even the inaugural PyBeach conference. His helpfulness and influence on everything he contributed to are hard to overstate. He was engaged in many other communities as well, and it’s no secret or surprise that many people active in them knew him and appreciated his work. Somewhere in there Michael and I became friends as well. I don’t know if he knew how to operate in any other way, and I think that line was rather blurred for him in general, since he always sought ways to help other people. The number of times I’ve witnessed him introduce two people to each other is beyond any count, and that’s basically what he was about: making connections. These connections lead to job opportunities, friendships, and who knows what else. The Southern California Python community has lost one of its major champions, and he will be greatly missed. Rest in peace, goodwill. — Nik Kantar, May 2025 I met Michael at a PyLadies event in 2011. He'd offered his company's office space for some of the workshops and hackathons that PyLadies was running at the time. That was the first of many events that we would organize together, over more than a decade. When SoCal Python needed more organizers in 2013, Michael volunteered countless hours to organize monthly meetups where folks from LA and Orang...