Senior IRI Software Engineer Don Purhagen Passes Away
Innovative Developer Created IRI Workbench and Helped Users Worldwide
April 25, 2023 - Melbourne, FL - With deep sadness, IRI, The CoSort Company, announces the sudden passing earlier this month of its de facto CTO and initial creator of the IRI Workbench interface, Don Purnhagen. Don worked at IRI continuously since 2005, and led a team of innovative developers and support engineers who have since collectively taken on the mantle of his many responsibilities within the office, including: ongoing enhancements to IRI Workbench, key data masking and test data customer service engagements, and LAN administration.
Prior to these roles, Don also dramatically increased IRI’s footprint in the relational database market – particularly for ETL, data quality, and PII masking operations – by leveraging his long history in database administration, SQL operations, Eclipse, and IRI’s core data processing engine, SortCL. According to IRI SVP David Friedland, “Don had been our inspiration and leader in these areas since 2010, and also pioneered IRI's support for IoT, Hadoop, and streaming data in the Voracity platform he helped build.”
Of particular note, Don’s passing quickly revealed a deep well of respect and appreciation for the work he did presenting, implementing, and teaching IRI software to many resale, consulting, and customer partners in the US and abroad. Typical among condolences received was this comment in email from a customer in the Midwest: “Don was truly a gem – dedicated and service-oriented almost to a fault, with a heart of gold, not to mention his amazing technical knowledge. We’ll miss him very much.”
Don was 65 years old, and is survived by his wife, 6 children, and 7 grandchildren. A ham radio operator, Jeep enthusiast, and self-taught data scientist, Don was also active in the Filipino community in Brevard County. “Don had a rare combination of passions for technology and people. He was not only a great asset to IRI, but someone I’ll always also remember for sharing his warmth and good humor with everyone in his professional and personal life,” Friedland added.
