In Memory of Willy de Zutter

Willy de Zutter, the man behind BOINCstats and BAM!, passed away on Sunday, July 26th, after a long fight with cancer.

If you have been around BOINC for any length of time, you have used something Willy built. He launched BOINCstats in the early days of BOINC and kept it running for roughly two decades: parsing exports, tracking projects as they came and went, and giving crunchers a place to watch their numbers climb. He also built BAM!, the BOINC Account Manager, which is still how a lot of people attach and manage projects across an entire fleet of hosts. That was not a small piece of work, and he maintained it for years, mostly on his own time, mostly without a lot of thanks.

Free-DC and BOINCstats have been the two big stats sites for as long as most of us have been doing this. People sometimes framed it as a rivalry. It never really was. Running a stats site is a lot of unglamorous work: chasing broken exports, babysitting databases, answering the same questions over and over, and doing it every single day because people count on the numbers being there in the morning. Willy did that for twenty years. Anyone who has tried it knows what that costs.

Our condolences go out to Willy's family, and to everyone in the BOINCstats and BAM! community.

Twenty years of keeping the numbers running. Thanks, Willy.

— Skillz