He wasn't a friend, he was a guy who reached out to me because of stuff I'd written about COVID. We communicated over email and I encouraged him to write down a document with some of his experiences in it. The stuff in my post is a tiny fraction of it.
We mostly discussed coding issues in epidemiological modelling. Science has big problems with bugs because scientists tend to assume programming is easy (they don't get exposure to professional standards and they rarely test their code). He'd been at the forefront of damage control and had lots of stories.
