Over the weekend, the Jekyll core team learned of the passing of one of our own: Frank Taillandier, popularly known by his GitHub username @DirtyF.

Ruby not being his forte, he chose to avoid code-level changes and instead focus on what he did best — engage with the community.

He helped resolve complaints reported on the GitHub issue tracker, ensured that Jekyll documentation remained simple for novice users yet detailed enough for advanced users seeking additional information.

He also served as the administrator for Jekyll’s public discourse forum where he not only addressed queries from users and provided tips to improve Jekyll workflow, he also shared feedback on Jekyll sites created by the community, and used the forum as a platform to gather feedback on unreleased iterations of Jekyll and in-house plugins.

Abreast with latest developments in the Web-verse, Frank was always quick to introduce technologies that vastly improved maintenance in the Jekyll organization. He was instrumental in setting up deploy previews for patches to Jekyll’s documentation site and later wiring GitHub Actions to handle continuous integrations for Jekyll and in-house projects.

In spite of spiritually moving away from Jekyll during the later part of his career, choosing to concentrate efforts on furthering JAMstack projects, he greatly remained active on Jekyll’s development channel on Slack relaying key feedback from the community or discuss concerns regarding the future of Jekyll at length.

Having untimely left Jekyll and our community with an unfillable void, he will be missed immensely.

Rest in Peace, friend and colleague.