Remembering Dave Täht

I was devastated to learn that Dave Täht passed away. I have known and worked with Dave for over a decade, and consider him a dear friend. I will miss him tremendously.

I first met Dave in Copenhagen in 2012 at the Linaro Connect / Ubuntu Developer Summit. At the time I was following the Bufferbloat mailing list where Dave, as he has done many times since, wrote a message to the bloat list saying that he would be at the conference, and asking if anyone else would be. I replied (off-list) asking if that included the “interested student” category. To which Dave replied, in his typical fashion:

So sure, come on down. The only thing I have on my plate is defining a spec for a bufferbloat test - and raising awareness of fq_codel and BQL while I’m here. So our interests are congruent.

The food at the reception was good… and free.

So I went. I remember travelling to Copenhagen, getting to the conference hotel and finding Dave in his room in a somewhat jetlagged state. But despite this, he still took the time to talk to me and show an interest in what I had been doing. He looked at my data and test tool and immediately started requesting features. And thus started our decade+ collaboration around bufferbloat.

During the time since that first meeting in Copenhagen, Dave has been, at various times, my teacher, mentor and collaborator. And through it all, he also became my friend. He was always kind and generous, with his time and with his resources. Like when he rented a whole house boat for the Prague IETF, and invited everyone to come stay with him. Or when he bought me a drum kit for my birthday (which he managed to pull off while he was on another continent!) because he thought I should keep playing music, another of his passions.

He selflessly dedicated his time to making the internet better for everyone, and idealistically turned down several lucrative offers because he wanted to stay independent, and for his research to stay unencumbered and available to all. His contributions are too numerous to list, but without doubt the internet functions better for us all because of Dave’s effort. I am honoured to have known him and worked with him in this endeavour.

The late Terry Pratchett taught us that some one is not truly dead as long as their name is spoken. And like Pratchett himself, Dave’s name and legacy will live on in the very fabric of the internet, as well as with those of us that remember him.