When Eric joined us at Automattic in 2014, I was lucky enough to be his first team lead. At first I didn’t know what to make of this guy. Super young (even younger than most of the rest of us at the time!), always optimistic, seemed to be really sharp and willing to give anything a try. Pretty quickly, I realized that wasn’t just because he was new. That’s who Eric was. Optimistic. Sharp. Willing to try anything.

Eric was in Wichita Falls, Texas. A place that I’d never heard of, that he described as “the middle of nowhere, Texas”. By his own admission, he hadn’t seen much of the world, and had a pretty narrow view of it. That was going to change, pretty quickly, and while I doubt he knew what to expect, he was always willing, perhaps even eager, to expand his view on almost everything.

About 6 months after he joined, we had our first team meetup. In Rome (Italy, not Georgia). Here’s us in Piazza di Spagna. I grew up in a small town myself, and so I have some perspective on what it’s like to come from somewhere “small” and find yourself somewhere that feels “big”.

Eric went on to attend 36 meetups in 11 different countries (that we have records for). So he got to see a decent chunk of the world. I’m so glad that he got to experience that, and that I got to join him for some of it. Along the way, I have two favorite memories with Eric.

The first was on a meetup, when I encouraged (pushed?) everyone to go to a Vietnamese restaurant, where we ate a bunch of seafood, including a full fried fish. While he hadn’t eaten anything like that before, Eric was first up to try it, and even ate one of the eyeballs (with some friendly nudging). It was also the first time he’d used chopsticks properly, and after I showed him quickly how to do it, he picked it up immediately and never looked back.

The second was something that became an ongoing joke between us. Eric joined Automattic as a PHP engineer. Within a few months, the entire company was making the pivot towards JavaScript as a core language, and Eric was concerned that he didn’t really know JavaScript very well. I put him in charge of a major project that was entirely JS-based, and jokingly told him “sink or swim, buddy — time to learn JavaScript”. Of course I was there to help, although I was also learning as we went. As was his way, he picked it up quickly, excelled, and kept on rockin’.

Years later, after we had both worked our ways through various roles at the company, I had the pleasure of him joining me on Woo. At this point I was leading the Woo business, and Eric joined us to lead our Payments Engineering group. Arguably the most important group at the company, they are directly responsible for a significant chunk of all of Automattic’s revenue, and some of the core commerce and payments experiences. Eric joined with minimal background in payments, but as was always the case, he jumped in head-first and just “figured it out”. As he liked to say, he kind of juggernauted it. In a relatively short time, he had a huge impact on the group, how they operated, the products they produced, and how they all showed up.

I will always remember Eric’s generous, optimistic, practical, and authentic spirit. He was who he was. No apologies. None needed. Thanks for just being yourself Eric.