In Memory of Jason Rudolph

My friend and former GitHub coworker Jason Rudolph died in May 2026. With the consent of his family, I’m writing about some of my memories of Jason. Platform I first properly (and in meatspace) met Jason when I joined GitHub’s “Platform” team. That team was a few (unreasonably excellent) engineers who maintained and improved GitHub’s API. As almost all features ended up touching the API in some way, the role could have easily become a gatekeeping one. Instead, Jason turned it into primarily an educational one. Jason didn’t really say no to people. He would take (sometimes huge) amounts of time and effort explaining and teaching them how and why to do things a better way. This didn’t just extend to GitHub’s API but also basic things like language. I remember the first time I incorrectly used the word “less” rather than “fewer”. Jason delicately and politely contradicted me and explained the difference and how to remember it: fewer are countable items, less is for quantities What was so…