Another thing that made me feel close to him was his work on the Python Cookbook 2nd Edition, in which he (and other big names in the community) delightfully talks the reader through intricacies and insights of programming, "We read Knuth so you don't have to".

Watching Tim do his thing was a pleasure. He'd go from long, deep technical dives (that he'd make as approachable as possible) into comic relief and human connection in the fractional wink of an eye.

The brief interactions we had will always be cherished as high points in my Pythonista trajectory.

One favorite of mine was this response: https://www.python.org/doc/humor/#id15. I also like https://www.python.org/doc/humor/#id19 very much.

  $ python -c "import this"
  The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

  Beautiful is better than ugly.
  Explicit is better than implicit.
  Simple is better than complex.
  Complex is better than complicated.
  Flat is better than nested.
  Sparse is better than dense.
  Readability counts.
  Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
  Although practicality beats purity.
  Errors should never pass silently.
  Unless explicitly silenced.
  In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
  There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
  Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
  Now is better than never.
  Although never is often better than *right* now.
  If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
  If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
  Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

I focus on how I learned to be a better software developer from him, in both writing better code and supporting others.