It is with great sadness that we must report the staggering loss of our good friend and colleague, Maurice Marrink. Maurice died in a car crash last Friday.

Maurice was a dear co-worker, project member and good friend. He was always enthusiastic, willing to lend a hand and above all friendly. Coming from the northern parts of the Netherlands, Maurice could be quite stubborn at times–a trait that is invaluable working as a software engineer, especially when working in a group of strong minded people.

Maurice was a great asset to the Wicket community since Wicket became open source. The Wicket team was fortunate to have Maurice on board since last March. He was committed to the continued success of Wicket and the Apache community as a whole.

Maurice has guided students that created the initial Wicket Dojo integration (Wicket 1.1 timeframe, before Wicket Ajax). He put a lot of effort into creating two security frameworks for Wicket, with the latest and greatest open sourced: the Wicket Security framework (aka Swarm/Wasp). He had many good ideas on the future of Wicket and integrating his projects into our core distribution.

Within Topicus he was one of the pillars of our company–professionally, and even more important: culturally. He was always organizing and attending social events, nerd nights, cart challenges and board gaming evenings. Just two weeks ago he was our hero when he arranged tickets for a pre-screening of Batman: The dark knight at our local IMax theatre.

Maurice, we miss you. All our thoughts and good wishes are with you and your loved ones. May your soul find peace.

- Martijn Dashorst and the Wicket crew.