Daniel Garcia, developer of FastLED, has died
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I've been a FastLED user for many years now, including in a commercial product, and it was a truly wonderful library. Extremely succinct, and so clear and natural it felt obvious, like the only way it could have been implemented. This is of course much more difficult to achieve than its apparent ease would suggest - especially for a C++ library.
Beyond the library's technically great implementation, it was also open source and permissively licensed, massively enabling both beautiful art and innovative products. And Garcia was very active in the community, helping many people new to hardware development take their first steps.
This is a huge loss, especially for someone so young who could have made so many more powerful contributions to the shared world of code we live in. Condolences to all who knew him personally.
FastLED was the main reason I was able to complete a holiday window display for a prominent NYC retailer, with a very limited budget, and only 2.5 weeks to do the project. I really pushed the library to the limits, as we had more LEDs and effects than most Arduinos could handle with a smooth frame rate, so we ended up using an Arduino Due clone and driving the LEDs through almost all the serial lines. FastLED handled it all, no problem.
Thank you, Dan, for your gift.
When you look at the library code, it's amazing to see how much complexity has been abstracted away behind such a simple interface.
Gone too soon, he will be missed by many.