Yesterday, Aaron Swartz commited suicide. Unlike the many other blog posts on the internet today and yesterday, I never knew Aaron. I never worked with him, emailed him, or read his blog posts.
In fact, the only reason I knew of Aaron before his suicide, was through his anti-SOPA/PIPA website, demandprogress.org. I don’t have any memories of Aaron to share, no stories about how his minimalism approach to code inspired me, I don’t even care that he co-created Reddit, or that he co-authored the original RSS spec. However, at one point in both our lives, we were fighting for the same cause, to bring awareness in stopping SOPA.