This is an approximate transcript of the tribute I gave on November 5, 2022 in honor of Nenya Edjah.
Good morning everyone, I'm Teddy. I was Nenya's roommate for 3 years in college.
It's funny: I'm not usually one to remember the first time I meet a person. But in these past few weeks, as I've had the time to reflect and remember, our first meeting has jumped out sharply and distinctly in my memory. And I want to share that with you all today.
It was the first semester of freshman year at Harvard. I, like many other freshman, was taking CS 50, our intro computer science class. A month into the class, our homework for the week was to build a spellchecker. That in itself wasn't very interesting, but… there was a leaderboard. An ultimate test of who among the freshman noobs was "best." I toiled for hours, neglecting all my other classes, and after a week, I had risen to the top of the leaderboard. There were only two names above mine: Nenya's and above him, Rob Bowden, one of the teaching fellows.
I'm not sure what compelled me — maybe it was a sense of competitiveness, curiosity, or desire for new friends — but I sent a message to Nenya on FB. My message said, "Yo fam, I admire your work on the CS50 psets." It was an invitation to join forces to topple Rob from the leaderboard. To my surprise, he responded and agreed.
We met in Lamont Cafe soon after and the conversation flowed fluidly. We exchanged the unique insights we had independently discovered and integrated them into each other's code. And we kept brainstorming new ideas, coming up with hacks and optimizations that we could use to gain any edge we possibly could. We kept talking, pushing our code to the limit in the days after. By the end, we had usurped Rob and taken the top two spots: me in second and, of course, Nenya in first.
We were inseparable from that point forward. The rest of CS 50 was an absolute blur: solving puzzles and taking goofy photos on puzzle day, winning the CS 50 Programming Contest, staying on campus for winter break and building our "pseudocode parser" that could turn English into code. And then the semesters after that: taking many of the same courses, becoming roommates, joining and rebuilding the Crimson's website, countless final projects, late nights, McDonald's chicken nugget orders, and Super Smash Bros games.
Through it all, our friendship continued to deepen. We were always either collaborating, competing, or joking, sometimes all 3 at once! We were joined at the hip; some even jokingly observed we operated as an old married couple with the amount of bickering we did.
What struck me about Nenya as we got closer as friends was the variety of roles he played in my life and the ease with which he switched between them. I look around at the people here today, and I know that he played similar roles in many of your lives.
There was Nenya the teacher. Even when we were taking the same course, if I ever didn't understand a concept, he could break it down and help me grok it. And when we were TFs for a multitude of computer science courses, he was everyone's favorite TF. The TF who always knew all the answers and could actually help you understand how to arrive at the answer. The TF who had infinite patience and who would spend extra time long after office hours were over to make sure that everyone was attended to.
There was Nenya the mentor. In the Crimson, he was the role model many looked up to. He worked with everyone to develop their professional and coding skills. He always seemed to have the most grounded career advice and believed in everyone's potential. He was everyone's cheerleader, and he never accepted anything less than your best: a standard he also held himself to.
There was Nenya the pure wonderkid. The guy who was always acing classes and psets, even without ever taking notes in lecture! The guy who would always top any and every code leaderboard in class, be it in efficiency, speed, accuracy, or elegance. The guy who was landing the coolest and most lucrative internships and jobs. The guy who could build any application or program as long as he put his mind to it.
There was Nenya the collaborator and partner. One of the few people I worked on everything with. We were building new programming languages, weird machine learning models and paradigms, and rearchitecting an entire newspaper's website. He was always pushing ambitious, boundary redefining ideas, and we had each other's trust in making those things a reality.
And finally, there was Nenya, my roommate and everyone's friend. The one stealing from my salt and vinegar chips stash sophomore year. The one who taught me how to play Dota. The one who was always down to play Super Smash Bros and order 20 chicken nuggets at 3 in the morning. The one I could talk to about anything: even share some of my deepest insecurities. The one who could make all of us laugh with his jokes and antics.
That was Nenya. The impossibly smart, ambitious, compassionate, kind, and irreplaceable person that I got to know over the last 6 years. And I just feel so incredibly lucky to have seen him in all his facets and call him one of my closest friends. My best friend.
I want to close by sharing a common theme that has come up in the last few weeks as I've talked with many of the friends and people that Nenya impacted. It comes in two parts. First, I truly believed Nenya was going to change the world. He had the talent, ambition, charisma; it was never a question of if but when and what. But second, he already did change the world. Look at us here. We were his world. And he was a large, outsized part of ours. The impact he had on us is already profound and immeasurable, and that's enough.
Thank you for everything, Nenya. I'm going to miss you dearly.
If you would like to share your own memories and photos of Nenya, feel free to do so here.