In memory of Mark Longair

This month we lost one of the longest-standing Flourish teammates, Mark Longair — an exceptional engineer and a kind, principled, curious, loyal, self-sacrificing friend.

I remember the first time I heard Mark’s name, after he mentioned to a colleague that he was open to a discussion about joining our embryonic startup. The sentence was, “You don’t get to hire someone like Mark Longair very often”. Which was true. But the broader truth is that you don’t get to meet someone like Mark very often.

Mark Longair

When I think of Mark, I think of the phrase “my life is my message”. Because the way Mark lived completely reflected his beliefs: that kindness and integrity are the qualities that matter most; that you should put others before yourself; that you should understand things from first principles; that you should take joy in the fact that the world is full of interesting and beautiful things, even if it can be saddening and bitterly disappointing at times; and that you should never compromise on what you believe in.

Mark was good at almost everything, from science and coding to music. He won every game or sport the team ever played. He loved games, which I always thought was maybe because they created a space where it was okay to be a tiny bit competitive – unlike in real life, where his goals were always to help others and contribute to the world, and his kindness always trumped any desire to win.

Mark’s commitment to contributing to the world is widely visible on the internet. He was a significant participant in many open-source projects, worked for years in civic tech at mySociety, and dedicated a huge amount of time to online communities such as Stack Overflow, where his deep technical knowledge (especially of git version control) helped vast numbers of engineers around the world.

At Flourish, he was a brilliant manager but ended up more of a hands-on engineer – perhaps because he cared so much about the people he was responsible for that it was almost too much when he was also such a fully dedicated parent and partner. But of course he was a brilliant individual contributor too, and continued to always fly the flag for the organisation doing the right thing.

Mark contributed massively to Flourish, working on many customer-facing features such as Live CSV (inspired by the need to support election coverage, in keeping with his work at Democracy Club). But he also made our backend infosec much more robust; helped us grow up when it came to management practices; mentored or supported almost everyone in the company at some point; and also started various traditions, such as “x-channels”, a way of working in the open on Slack that has since become widespread across Flourish and Canva.

When I think of Mark, I also think fondly of many little things. His packed, heavy backpack, which seemed to contain everything that could possibly be needed at any time. The precise and articulate way that he wrote. The way his face lit up when talking about some obscure thing that he found interesting. His love of lightning talks. The downbeat way he said good morning, which somehow captured his unique way of sounding enthusiastic and a tiny bit disappointed at the same time.

It’s common to say that someone will “live on in our hearts”, and that is certainly true for Mark. But I think he will also live on in our actions. Many of his friends and colleagues have said in the last week that they are now more determined than ever to be a little more like him. I certainly feel the same.

Thank you for everything, Mark. We will try to live up to your memory.

Mark (far right) and the Flourish team at a team event in 2021