Mikeal Rogers has died
48 comments
·June 10, 2025sh1mmer
When Node was just getting big I met Mikael for the first time at some Node event or another. It’s hard to overstate or forget how welcoming he was, always excited to see folks, and the one getting the energy of the room going.
The more time I spent with Mikael the more I saw him doing all the small things that needed doing for a community, or an event. Even just hanging out Mikael was always so considerate and tried to make things special for everyone.
He will be missed.
nailer
His own events were rad. I remember O’Reilly running some giant corporate event (maybe called JSfest) and Mikeal rented out the Marines Memorial Theatre in San Francisco for a couple of days beforehand and had way kore interesting and relevant talks by nearly every major person in the JavaScript ecosystem.
adrianparsons
Yes! He organized a barebones conference out of the Meetup office in New York. The premise was that all attendees would do a 10 minute talk on any subject (I think it was called 10conf?). Mikeal spoke about his pour-over coffee setup while using it to make coffee for everyone.
I really enjoyed time I spent with him and appreciated his kindness and leadership in the community. My thoughts are with his family and loved ones.
nailer
Memory unlocked! I remember his coffee obsession and him going to extra effort to make sure that his events actually had real coffee rather than the usual conference garbage that was popular at the time.
skeptrune
I never met Mikeal, but was still touched second-hand by the lovely messages on the cancer-diaries repository he opened up[1].
[1]: https://github.com/mikeal/cancer-diaries/pulls?q=is%3Apr
essgee
I had the pleasure of meeting Mikeal on IRC when we were just teenagers. Countless hours were spent on owned meetingplace servers getting to know one another. I always found myself impressed with his breadth of knowledge on nearly every topic of conversation.
We let several years pass before reconnecting two years ago this month. We sat at the alameda yacht club for hours discussing family, fatherhood, career, and sutras, his passion was as addictive as it had always been.
With a newborn, he had every reason to avoid meeting, but his nature was giving. By the end we had affirmed our friendship and my heart was calm. We agreed to meet again. My belief is that some day we will.
I love you Mikeal and I will miss you dearly.
KevinHalter
Mikeal was the CTO of my 2nd startup, Getable. Incredible human being, foodie, technologist, intelligence and overall caring person. He shared the diagnosis several months back and everything happened so quickly. Thoughts and prayers to Anna (his wife), children and family.
When we worked together, Anna and Mikeal were not yet parents and we were all a lot younger. He is a humble, beautiful human being. I know his spirit will live on with his children. I just don’t know what to say other than sending my love to his family and #CancerSucks
jonchurch_
Sad to hear this but even happier now about the existence of the Node.js documentary[0]. Glad this happened and that some of his stories of Node’s early days are recorded.
null
gitgud
Devastating… I discovered Mikeal like most people did, from curiosity about npm packages in a project.
He wrote a lot of opensource projects and was a refreshingly nice and patient person to interact with on GitHub. Condolences to his friends and family, he’ll be missed in the FOSS world
funky_tek
Mikeal was simply an amazing human being. I'm writing this wearing my NodeConf shirt right now—one of the best times I've ever had in any community. Being friends with Mikeal was incredible because you could always pick up where you left off, no matter how much time had passed. During our time working together on ProtocolLabs projects, we talked almost daily about work, open source, ideas, philosophy, spirituality, and of course, hip hop.
He possessed a unique and brilliant intellect paired with a compassionate and generous spirit. His interpretation of Buddhist sutras and other sacred writings through an engineer's lens was insightful and inspiring—the foundation for many great conversations. I had just moved back to the Bay Area around the time of his diagnosis and was looking forward to reconnecting in person. Things happened so fast. Sending love to his family.
mgkimsal
Even when you know it's coming, it's hard to process. Met Mikeal at oscon in ... 2007 I think, where he was presenting windmill as a testing tool for js/ajax. We kept in touch for a few years, and he was kind enough to meet up with me during some travel time in California the following year. He took great joy in introducing me to some tapas place I can't remember now, but I do remember the excitement he had just... telling me about it. That low key passion (tech, food, anything else) is one of the things I still remember about the few times we met in person.
Reading about his cancer last year was difficult, not so much for him directly; he seemed to have made peace with it (that's the impression I got anyway). But it's a reminder of my own mortality, and I know I would not react or continue on the way he did. That's difficult to acknowledge.
kyungw00k
He was well-known online for the request module — a name every developer seemed to know.
I first met him in person at playnode.io 2012 in Korea. Despite the language barrier, he patiently listened to my broken English and took the time to answer with kindness and sincerity. That was my first impression of him — and it stayed with me.
He taught not just through code, but through the way he treated others.
Rest in peace.
IsaacSchlueter
That trip is the origin of many of my happiest memories. It was amazing to meet you all, and to share that adventure with him. The playnode.io team and the Korean JavaScript community treated us with such incredible warmth and kindness, we talked often over the years about what a wonderful experience that was.
meandave
Mikeal was extremely welcoming to me when I met him over a decade ago, It was either JSConf or NodeCamp, He was always super insightful and encouraging to my personal growth as an engineer and open source contributor. NodeJS wouldn't be what it is without him, especially the community around it in the early days. I got to work with him for a bit at protocol labs. This is a major loss to open source
cdata
I had the pleasure of meeting Mikeal on a few occasions, but mainly I've benefited from his work over the years (initially via the JavaScript ecosystem, and later through the Protocol Labs community).
PouchDB was way ahead of its time, and I'm just now coming around to how crazy cool it was and is compared to most other tech in its space.
He made a great deal of positive impact on technical areas I care about. Rest in peace.
swyx
just learning about pouchdb now. why did it not take off you think?
diggan
Around 2016 sometimes, a small team (me included) built a "mini" version of our main product (Typeform) which was using PouchDB for syncing forms/answers between the backend and the mobile app (written with Phonegap/Cordova if I remember correctly), mainly so we could have offline capabilities.
Everything worked fine, and was cool to launch something like that since I'm not a mobile developer by any measure. But PouchDB required using CouchDB for the syncing, which was both the first document DB we deployed in our production infrastructure, and the only use case for having CouchDB at all, so we didn't have lots of expertise about it.
I think managing CouchDB ended up being the biggest maintenance hassle at one point, as it was kind of an extra piece, compared to the "real" setup that hosted the other production data. AFAIK, there was no experts on CouchDB at the company either.
So I guess in the end if this "frontend sync library" you're want to use also ends up dictating the backend storage/engine, then make sure you can "afford" a completely new and standalone piece for just that. Unless you're already using CouchDB, then it seems like a no-brainer.
Probably today I'd cobble together something "manually" with Postgres and WebSockets/SSE instead if I was looking to do the same thing again.
k__
I remember 2017, at offline camp, I proposed talking about using offline first libraries with existing backends. Nobody, was interested. Seems the people interested in such tech were pretty much sold on CouchDB.
Just now, almost a decade later, we get libraries like Tinybase and SignalDB.
neom
In addition to the sync issues mentioned, personally I think overcoming the browsers was the real issues. Nobody wanted to support this, the security would have been a contrived nightmare.
Mikeal was instrumental in helping me get established in the node community when it was super tiny. Being around him was a joy! He made those around him feel part of something special. He made me feel like I belonged.
I was a camp counselor at node camp three years in a row. He created such a magical experience that I cried when I got home, I wanted to live in nodecamp forever. I still do.
Seeing some of the folks posting in here makes it hurt worse. I have so many memories, like I remember all of us riding the bus back and forth to the camp, so much laughter and fucking around. Hanging at each others houses, going to meetups, and just being part of something special. Talking shit thru pull requests. Late night dorking around on meatspac.es etc etc etc I could go on for days.
Thank you Mikeal for all the good times.