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News | Mar 21, 2026 | In Loving Memory - Yorhel

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It is with deep sadness that we make this post about the passing of a very close friend of mine and a critical person in the development of so many communities. Yorhel, most commonly known as the creator of VNDB, has passed away in the 17th of March.

We have waited a while to make our own announcement, to respect his family and friends. I would like to honor his memory with a memorial post.

VNDB thread

I learned so much from Yorhel. I don't know if I ever taught him anything in return, other than setting my own foolish example of how not to do things, which he always already knew.

The first time I met Yorhel was in the hotel lobby of Motel 1 on the first day of the JVMG in Leipzig Germany in 2019. Professor Magnus and Yorhel were in the lobby chatting, though at this time I did not know either of them. The young man with shoulder length blond hair wearing a Tor t-shirt. Yorhel was always the first one there at any meeting. He had an ease and grace with socializing.

Initially I was guarded, thinking of Yorhel as a rival, with his database bigger and grander than my own. We were seated a good distance apart that first day. The following day however, I was determined to sit next to him. The first thing I notice is his laptop running dwm. The very same window manager I use. Likely no more than a few hundred people on earth choose to use it. Next I learn Yorhel is running Gentoo linux, the very same Linux I enjoyed using for many years. Where I left it for something more stable, Yorhel seemed to enjoy the challenge of keeping everything up to date. We talked about music and found we both new of Armin van Buren, and even listened to ASOT into the episode 300's. I was a little envious Yorhel was from the Netherlands, home to many of the trance DJ's I liked. We were similar in age as well, with me being about a year or 2 older. I quickly changed my view of Yorhel from a rival, to more of a comrade in arms. We were in the same battle. For running a database on the internet is a battle. No matter how cool of an approach or solution I had to an issue, Yorhel not only had the same idea, but took it to the next level. We exchanged much in such a short time together in Leipzig. Yorhel had been interested in Patreon, which I was using at the time. I shared with him my experience, and he shortly after opened an account for VNDB. Where I was proud of my hosting costs, Yorhel introduced me to an option that offered 2x as much server for half the price, and it was even located in Canada. We both loved a good deal. And we'd frequently share server sales deals throughout the year.

We always had an open dialog together. Whether it was on IRC, lonely.town or Fluffy chat. I'd always try to the first to wish VNDB a happy birthday and Yorhel a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Yorhel was quite an accomplished gamer. To my astonishment, even he had worked on Legendary Weapons within Guild Wars 2. I liked the pvp, he liked fractals.

I'll miss most our exchanges online. We have such an esoteric line of work, to have one human being with which to share the struggles, who would not only understand, but even offer solutions, it was the rarest and most precious of friendships.

--Rei

Though Yorhel's work may not have been widely visible to those outside the programming field, his legacy has left a mark on countless lives and businesses. With his flourishing mind for computer programming, and his entrepreneuring spirit, Yorhel fathered many projects that have highly impacted the programming and computer world: NCurses Disk Usage (ncdu), NCurses Direct Connect (ncdc), Yxml, manned.org, The Visual Novel Database, Framework Ultimatum (fu), Crystal, sqlbin, The Ultimate Website Framework (for Perl), SQL-Interp (for Perl), ncdutils, Nginx Configuration Generator (nginx-confgen), Torrent file reassembler (torreas), capnzig, Raspberry Pi surveilance camera (camstuff), XML parser in C (yxml), Statically linked binaries for Tor (tor-static), and so many other projects listed in g.blicky.net repository.

His knowledge and kindness will live on, impacting the lives of many people that have interacted with him.

--RinaK

R.I.P

VNDB has been the website that introduced me to world of Eroge & Visual Novels and i wouldn't discover that media (earlier at least) without it. Yorhel and that site hold special place in my Visual Novel journey. Thank you Yorhel and the crew of the site for your work and effort of expanding Visual Novels to the west.

Rest in Power, Yorhel

--Moon_Moon

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