Sharif, where are you?

Friday, August 2, 2024

The Lino community is currently worried about Sharif, who has been our second core developer since February 2021, for more than 3.5 years.

On Friday 2024-06-28 he left his home by motorcycle to visit a friend, and since then his cell phone is switched off. His family filed a missing person report at the police.

We hope that he had just a psychological crisis and decided to escape from everyday life. He is indeed an introvert person with tendencies to melancholy. It seems that people have seen him in Dhaka (the capital, quite far away from his home) and since then his family are angry with him because disappearing without explanations is obviously not a nice behaviour.

I have no contact with him. I know about all this only from chats with his wife, his sister and some friends. The last times he registered work sessions in Jane was 2024-06-22 (0:30 hours), 2024-06-21 (0:30 h) and 2024-06-16 (3:30 h).

I am pretty sure that Sharif’s disappearing has nothing to do with the political tensions in Bangladesh (see the news, e.g. Bangladesh bans Jamaat-e-Islami party following violent protests that left more than 200 dead).

Q: Are you having any problem without Sharif? Who does his work now?

A: Oh yes I am having problems without him! He was the main responsible for developing the Lino React front end, which is written in JavaScript, which is quite different from Python. I was glad to delegate this task to him. And now I need to dive into things like Node.js, npm or webpack. Fortunately there is no critical issue to fix, so I can take it calmly. My biggest problem is psychological: I am still under shock, mentally paralyzed. This story shakes my visions about remote asynchronous teamwork. There are moments where I am tempted to give up. But I won’t do that because Lino is my life’s work.

Q: Will he be able to work in your company again if he comes back after a long time?

A: Depends on how long. Right now it would still be possible. He owes us more than 5 weeks of work. So if he reappears, he will have to work some time before we pay him new money! I don’t plan to engage anybody else. But of course I don’t know the future.

If he comes back, we will learn from this and find rules to ensure a minimum of discipline. It is important that paid workers get enough pressure to work the agreed number of hours per week.

Let’s hope that he will soon reappear and give explanations, that his wife can forgive him and that this whole story turns out as an unpleasant adventure with a good end, Inshallah.