It has been an honour and a privilege to stand among colleagues, friends, and family this weekend in Montréal to celebrate the life and legacy of Phil Sawicki (1988 - 2025). His sudden passing has hit all of us hard, yet his enduring memory continues to bring us together, just as he did with every fibre of his presence and generosity during the time we had with him.
Sharing stories of Phil has been helping me and many others to move forward while still acknowledging and absorbing the pain of losing him and his grace, diligence, and unique camaraderie.
We have a Slack channel at NVIDIA for praising colleagues and celebrating wins on Omniverse. It will surprise no one to learn that Phil remains the most prolific poster across orgs, regularly elevating the work of others, especially when he had little to no direct involvement with their contributions.
He paid attention to what was happening across many different aspects of what we are building at NVIDIA and the broader ecosystem, and made sure that everyone felt valued. It also made us better, because Phil had a special way of interweaving constructive feedback while making you feel great about it.
Many colleagues have also shared that Phil reached out to them privately whenever they gave talks on OpenUSD, to make sure they knew how much he enjoyed their presentations and learned from them. For relative newcomers to hear things like this from a venerable USD guru like Phil does wonders for expanding the pool of expertise across domains and disciplines for the kind of data engineering that is needed to extend human capabilities in this next era of industrial digitalisation and global collaboration.
On my way out of San Francisco to Montréal, I found myself inexplicably craving a smoothie, only to learn shortly after that Phil regularly made smoothies in the morning for his Autodesk colleagues using the company-provided fruit baskets, forming an impromptu “Breakfast Club” that got everyone hitting the ground running with invigorated pep on any given day at the office. Louis Marcoux wrote and delivered a beautiful eulogy recounting these and many other anecdotes on behalf of Phil’s past and present colleagues, and did us all proud.
Being here in Montréal, taking in even a small sampling of the atmosphere and venues that Phil frequented regularly, is a gift. When I brought him to an onsite workshop with Microsoft in Redmond, he showed up with fresh bagels from Fairmount, to the delight of all. I can’t overstate how much Phil’s approach to life builds the kinds of bridges that we need as humans— microcosmically in the OpenUSD ecosystem, and macrocosmically beyond our professional existences.
We will be continuing to honor Phil’s contributions next month at SIGGRAPH, and I welcome anyone who wants to speak more in person about Phil there to reach out to me. Those kinds of exchanges have been blessings in an ongoing process.
Dziękuję na zawsze, Philippe. We raise all our USDrinks to you.