I don't know what to ask you in a public forum, but it's nice to see your name pop up!

Why did you make epithaps? Any interesting organizational or technical challenges you encountered on the way?

Initially it was a combination of just for the fun of it (it's a small script, as OP described). Secondarily there was the feeling of "everyone is going to go work at [major competitor]" and I was curious whether I could collect the data to show it. (I never ended up looking into this, but maybe HR did.)

As a dumb script it was not designed to be especially flexible. One thing I remember needing to fix was that by its nature it was archiving old data and preserving it, which meant that it was accidentally deadnaming trans people. My recollection is this was a small code fix, but an interesting lesson in social consequences of oblivious software.

Is it still going?

Were you ever made change it by HR?

I left 5 years ago. Loved that thing!

It was there when I left several months ago, so I assume so. Or maybe I shouldn't, they started shuttering a lot of these kinds of things after layoffs.

It's still there, just used it to see if I had guessed right on Rachel's workings (I hadn't). Thanks for making a very useful tool!

Just in case you meant otherwise Epitaphs is not my tool, but I agree it is very useful :)

It was still going at the time I left (~2y). Most of the work of keeping it alive had been done by others for the last decade, so I hope someone else is still carrying the torch.

We had the occasional HR interaction but to my recollection never anything nasty.

I'm still (poorly) maintaining it!

Thanks for making epitaphs <3

In what company, if I may ask?

It seems like Google from all the people who responded in this thread :)

The blog post mentions "Someone else who knew you had to add it", but this is not exact (or no longer exact). An employee can send an email to a special address with the content, and it will show up when they leave the company.

That's what I did. That said, I can't double-check to see if it worked. :)

Thanks for the tool, Evan!

You are both right. Originally you could not email, and like the OP I kind of liked the ceremony of entrusting someone with a message to send from beyond the grave. But someone contributed the code to make the email work, likely after the OP's time.

Laurent FYI it didn't work (FYI we interacted over the cider font size thing). I couldn't find you anywhere even though I know your ldap.

Ah, maybe I wrote the email and forgot to press send. :)

Well, you can update Epitaphs and add a link to "go/laurentlb". Thanks!