The Pick world lost one of its pillars when Jonathan "Jon" Sisk passed away after a battle with pancreatic cancer. If you've been in this community for any length of time, you already know the name. If you learned Pick from a book, there's a good chance Jon wrote it.
I knew Jon for decades, and the thing that sticks with me is how generous he was with what he knew. This was a guy who literally wrote the book on Pick. Several of them, actually: The Pick Pocket Guide, PICK/BASIC: A Programmer's Guide, Exploring the Pick Operating System and more. He made the stuff accessible. Before Jon, if you wanted to learn Pick, you kind of had to know somebody. After Jon, you could walk into a bookstore and buy a real textbook. His publishing opened the door to understanding all thing Pick.
Jon started his career at Microdata, back when Reality was still the only commercial implementation of Pick, and it didn't take long for him to see that the whole ecosystem needed something it didn't have yet: training. So he left and started JES & Associates, the first independent Pick training shop. That took guts as the market barely existed, but Jon built it anyway.
Dick Pick himself tapped Jon to write The Pick Pocket Guide and later Encyclopedia Pick, that monster 1500-page reference that tried to cover every last corner of the system. EPick was like a wiki before the web existed, complete with hyperlinks and working examples. It was ahead of its time, and so was Jon.
He was Series Editor for the Pick Library at McGraw-Hill. He wrote columns for International Spectrum, PickWorld and Byte Magazine, among others. He created the Pick Technical Certification Program, the only objective certification the platform ever had. He published The Database Digest. He trained people one-on-one over the internet before most of us knew what that meant. They called him "The Consultant's Consultant".
Jon was part of the team that bought Pick Systems in 2000 and served as VP of Training and Education. Even after he moved on from that role, he never really left the community. He kept teaching, training and consulting.
He will be missed by many people for many reasons, but here's what I'll miss most: Jon could take something tangled and complicated and lay it out so you could understand it. He had that rare gift of making hard things feel simple without making you feel slow. He treated every question like it mattered, whether it came from a Fortune 500 shop or a one-person operation running an old R83 box in a back room.
The Pick world is a small world, and losing Jon leaves a hole that won't be easily filled. His books are still out there, his students are still out there and systems he helped people understand are still running. That's a legacy most people would be proud of. Jon earned every bit of it.
Rest easy, old friend.
John Treankler johntreankler@binarystar.com
