Thursday we said goodbye to Brian Nickel, the dev largely responsible for the (sadly, now de-listed) Stack Exchange iOS app... but he's done much more than that in his time here as a valued member of the Public Platform development team.
I discovered the app years ago and it fueled my need to be constantly connected to the sites and to get my notifications when they came in - it was great for a lot of things. I remember writing up bug reports on MSE as some of my earliest actions here and Brian very thoughtfully responded to many of them with a fix relatively quickly, or an explanation of why the behavior is intended.
These were some of my first interactions with a dev here on SE and it was awesome that he was really interested in listening to issues that the community members had and working to address them - while it's something that I see in many of the devs here now, Brian was always one of the people who stood out from my early days as a user. I appreciate that because it really left me (as a community member) feeling like my efforts to help improve the site were valued.
From working here with him, I've come to know him as a very thoughtful, caring person who listens and is able to understand the needs of a project even when they aren't expressly stated. He's able to ask questions and devise solutions that are creative and clean. He's also well-recognized as being an excellent reviewer for code going out; able to see room for improvement and catch potential bugs that others may have overlooked.
It was great to work with him on projects like digging into the chat code to redesign the Teachers' Lounge, so that it could be moderated and his role as lead engineer on the Review Queues project from the beginning - these changes have really been beneficial for reviewers.
Thank you for your time and efforts - you will be missed! We wish you well in your next adventure!
