Matt.
— Hi, I’m Mateo Pérez
— Hello, I’m Axel Valdez. I just got here yesterday
— So, what do you do exactly?
— I’m a UI designer, and I also do front-end code. Mostly HTML and CSS, but also some JavaScript, usually for interaction stuff
— For how long have you been doing these things?
— It’s been like... 15 years now. Wow.
— And what do you like the most?
— CSS, definitely. I would be happy if I got to just do CSS forever.
— Alright. That was your English test. You’re fine.
That was my first interaction with Matt Perez, on my second day at Nearsoft in 2011. He kinda intimidated me at that time, mostly because I had read a lot about him on social media, and he was already a legend for founding Nearsoft, this weird and utopian software development joint in Hermosillo. At that time we were small. About 35 people including designers, software engineers, recruiters, and admin staff.
Nearsoft was broadly criticized locally because of their work philosophy. (You can read more about that in the book Radical Companies, by Matt and two other authors). When I joined, some of my friends made snarky comments about drinking the Kool-Aid without finding out what the catch was.
Funny thing: at one time, we joked about welcoming new team members with a glass of orange Kool-Aid in reference to this (orange was the brand color). We never did it, though.
For most of the next ten years I worked directly with Matt, as I became part of the digital marketing team and he was in sales. I got to know him and I feel like he took me under his wing in a lot of ways.
He helped me with my anxiety. We had a few conversations about it, and he, as practical as he was, gave me specific advice on how to deal with anxiety at work and checked in with me often.
He also once told me I was taking too much work because I wanted to be everywhere (I did), and I should learn how to say no. Then he proceeded to, from time to time, ask me to join or lead projects, only to tell me after I said yes and we set up a tight deadline, that the project was fake and I had failed the test. “You need to say no”. This went on for months.
Over the years, he became a role model for me on how to approach work. He taught me, inadvertently, that work can and should be fun. That the intersection of the things I want to do and the things the company needs are my most valuable contributions. That work and life are not enemies, the right job is part of our life and we should have a good time at it.
I once had a medical emergency in my family. I was very worried because I was also overloaded with work. He told me “go take care of them, we’ll figure it out, this just became very unimportant” which written out is so simple and logical I’m almost embarrassed to highlight it. We should have this kind of humanity in every job.
When I left Nearsoft, after it was sold and renamed, he replied to my farewell email the best way he could. He recognized some mistakes they had made in the process, and he fully owned them. That was also a teaching for me.
We worked on some things after that. We checked in from time to time. I talked to him about my divorce, parenting, and he talked to me about life, retirement, and his struggles with his cancer.
Matt passed away a week ago. It’s difficult for me to think about it. It’s weird knowing he is not here anymore. But I’m happy all the things he taught me, with words or by example, and his incredibly solid ethics and philosophy on how work should be, are with me forever.
Thanks Matt, you magnificent old fart. I’m not crying, you’re crying. And I will miss you forever.
