In Memoriam: Yoran "Yorhel" Heling
In the evening of Wednesday, March 18 (2026), I received a phone call. I picked up the phone, anticipating another scam call and stood up to walk to another room as not to wake my two pet birds. "Hi", I heard in the familiar voice of my old classmate and friend QCyph. I did not have his number saved, we always are on irc and we never call each other, we never needed to call each other. I immediately realised something was horribly wrong. His voice already cracked and I found myself sitting back down on the couch. "Last night, Yorhel passed away".
// Yorhel-kun
In 2006, the three of us started out as classmates at the bachelor Electrical Engineering in Groningen (NL). In QCyph, Yorhel found an equal in terms of programming, skill and sense of humour. Yorhel and I shared the same bus home to some middle-of-nowhere villages half an hour out of town. Through the power of unified confusion about lectures, readers and material, as well as shared interests in programming, hobbies and music, the three of us ended up being friends throughout the education.
Yorhel being a goofball between classes.Throughout our first year, I learned that Yorhel was busy on something called a visual novel database. Anime and visual novels weren't (aren't) really my thing, but with his self-written framework, Yorhel made it easy to parse, process and display large heaps of data in an organised manner. Some of those functions would translate really well into the Unreal Tournament Master Server Extension (UTMSE), a crude PHP website that showed gameserver statistics. Yorhel's framework resolved all problems that I was facing with a solution that was so much more elegant than I could possibly have imagined. Eagerly, I forked his open-source vndb code into what eventually became the 333networks website that you all know today.
In 2010, QCyph, Yorhel and I attended the last edition of BreakPoint at Bingen am Rhein (DE), near Frankfurt. Between the awesome compositions of great names like Fairlight, Puryx and farbrausch, Yorhel helped me rewrite my spit-and-ductape masterserver scripts into a unified Perl Masterserver application. It was in those days that Yorhel wrote the regex below that parsed all of the incoming GameSpy protocol data into a hash. Server uplink beacon processing, client list request and authentication in a single one-liner. In the minute that it took Yorhel to compose that regex, I did not yet realise the significance of that moment or acknowledge that every time I would look at a \key\value pair, I would think back to that moment.
Over the years, I regularly consulted Yorhel for thoughts, ideas or solutions pertaining 333networks. When I look back at the past decades, everything 333networks closely followed Yorhel's design philosophies: less is more, abstraction and reuse, not overcomplicating things and everything done in (pure) Perl. The 333networks website, still using Yorhel's TUWF, the masterserver (until 2022) written in Perl, for more than 15 years using that regex written at some improvised table on an old laptop. In recent days I wondered whether Yorhel acknowledged what kind of footprint he left on 333networks or what impact he has had on me as a person. He must have, if it was worth to him to mention 333networks on his TUWF homepage.
QCyph, Yorhel and Darkelarious at BreakPoint 2010, Bingen am Rhein (DE)Near the end of our education, somewhere in the Winter of 2010, we walked to the Zernike Campus bus stop to take the bus to Central Station. We must have realised that it would probably be one of the last times that we took that bus together, as our path diverged towards different graduation internships, in different parts of the country. The bus drove off a few minutes before we arrived at the stop, so we continued walking towards the next stop, with another bus every 10 minutes. On the way to the next stop, another bus drove by. It was fine, because we would just walk to the next stop and catch the next bus. Eventually, we walked all the way to Central Station. During that 45 minute walk, time went by faster than the 15 minute bus trip. If only we would have known what the future would have brought us since then.
In the years that followed, we lived our own lives. We all had our own challenges, difficulties and victories. Sure, we would meet up in person on occasion. While I was mostly lurking in the #frituurkromme IRC channel and comment there once in a while, QCyph and Yorhel would talk about their daily whereabouts, all day, every day. On March 17, Yorhel went afk for the last time. The silence in the channel has been deafening. For the past few days, I have been reliving memories of those idle moments between classes, mundane moments on the bus home and recalling how one of our teachers actually put us grown-ups at separate tables because we were f#cking around too much in his class. Good times.
Yorhel, we already miss you. The server world is not the same without you. It is going to be a lot harder without you than you would ever have acknowledged. Rest in glory.