John Edward Sahhar

Entered eternal life in God’s glory September 14, 2024

John “JJ” was born in San Diego, CA, at Mercy Catholic Hospital on his own father John’s birthday; what a beautiful birthday gift for his dad! Not only that, but it was also the first day of Spring. To top it off, as his piano teacher, Miss Charlotte, used to say, he was also born on the birthday of the great composer J.S. Bach and shared his initials. She saw back then JJ was gifted with learning music by ear and loved to compose his own rather than studying his lessons.

John was baptized and made his First Communion at St. Francis Church in Vista, California. He attended Mass with his family at St. Francis, went to AWANA and Bible Study Fellowship as a preschooler. In our first home in Vista, JJ (then known as “John-John”), met his childhood best friend, Alec, who was born 3 weeks before him and remained a friend for life.

JJ attended Casa Montessori pre-school in Carlsbad and then went to Tri-City Christian School K-8th grade. John went to Cathedral Catholic High School for grades 9-10 and then graduated from La Costa Canyon High School in 2015. Here, he met his wonderful friends Sam and Colin, with whom he shared the best of times. From 2015 to 2017, John attended Santa Barbara City College, where he and Sam were raucous roommates.

Music has always been JJ’s lifelong passion. A talented DJ, John not only played many parties in Isla Vista and Santa Barbara, he DJ’ed and mixed at clubs like EOS and was part of “We Jungle” with his besties. John used his genius talent on the computer to create super-original mixes of music. He also played in bands with his buddy Sam and others. Although he took piano and drum lessons (double foot pedal was his specialty), like most things with JJ, he was self-taught and naturally gifted at bass, drums and piano, learning music and composition on his own. John contributed to the development of the popular electronic modular Synthesizer, Serum by Steve Duda. He had the privilege of collaborating in the studio with respected artists like Depeche Mode, Dizzy Wright, Ghostmane, Brennan Savage, Sonny Moore, Desert Hearts, Rufus du Sol and the legendary Jeff Bridges. JJ performed at Lightning in a Bottle, Do Lab@Coachella, Dirtybird and Woogie Weekend. Although he eventually left his touring days behind, he still enjoyed composing as a hobby.

John was a graduate of the “Luminous Heart Institute” in Costa Rica and was an Internationally certified Yoga & Meditation Instructor. His mentor there was Kadri Kurgun; John loved that he learned from the best; he proudly told everyone how Kadri was trained directly by the Dalai Lama. John practiced yoga often; when he lived in Santa Barbara for many years, he walked to Core Power yoga almost daily, where he was loved and welcomed by all. It was living in Santa Barbara that he met his awesome friend Evan and grew close to his beloved cousin Natasha, often having dinner at her Santa Barbara home. He lived in Santa Barbara for 5 years until he moved back to Vista in 2020 and it was in Santa Barbara that he was the happiest; he dreamed of one day buying a home there and living there forever.

Involved in so many activities as a youth, JJ played Little League, soccer, flag football, basketball, tennis, was in cross country and competitive swimming at North Coast Aquatics; but he really found his childhood passion sport in competitive Sabre Fencing. JJ trained at San Diego Fencing in Escondido, he won a first-place trophy in competition and traveled to Las Vegas to compete. Of late, he was re-learning golf, often going to the driving range with his Dad in the afternoon and then for a meal at his favorite sushi spot. He also golfed with his mom and Freddie as her Mother’s Day gift and showed his natural athleticism on the course.

His greatest love throughout life was the ocean, he surfed for the love of being in the water with friends and family and he was an avid surfer all throughout San Diego County, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Tavarua (Fiji), Costa Rica and Nicaragua. He was inspired by his surfer dad’s footsteps and spent many years surfing almost daily with his father, brother Freddie, friends Jack and James and so many others.

A cat lover his whole life, JJ loved his Bosco, Jetson, Misty and Parko, and talked about how he knew he would see them one day in heaven. John volunteered at the Cat and small Pet shelter of the north county Humane Society and was scheduled to work there the afternoon he passed away.

Professionally, John’s industry accomplishments in such a short time are too numerous to recount here, because he was so passionately involved in so many projects, so we can only touch on some of them: John followed his childhood computer passion, beginning with the Linux Kernel at the early age of 5, and turned it into a career. A self-taught computer “genius”, he learned coding at age 13, created video games and, at age 15, mined his own “bit coin” before anyone ever knew what crypto was!

Between the young ages of 17-19, John worked in the open-source community. During this time, he worked with the founder of Runelite on the first stand-alone Runescape. JJ was also the founder of the widely recognized OSRS private server SoulSpirit. He worked on the Unreal Engine 4 Oculus Rift SDK and spoke on professional panels at Oculus Connect 3 & 4 and so much more.

Although John attended junior college, he felt it was too slow, and he began studying online courses offered by Harvard University. He essentially was his own “bootcamp” and taught himself to be a software coding engineer. His first job was for a 3D printing company. He excelled in designing embedded systems for medical-grade EEG manufacturers and developed tools for mind studies for the neuroscience department at UCSB.

A chance meeting at the checkout line at Trader Joe’s in Santa Barbara led to a full-time job in mining bit coin and software engineering for a start-up company in Santa Barbara. JJ travelled to Oregon to set up their infrastructure grid. One of his favorite experiences during this period was attending Burning Man with his boss and coworkers. Together they set up their own display featuring the work they were doing for UCSB. At burning Man, JJ also performed as a DJ. For a period of several years, JJ continued to manage the crypto mine in Oregon, which was one of the largest in the state.

Brilliant and tenacious, JJ would always say he wasn’t the most intelligent (although, he really was) but that he had the “strongest will” of anyone. While in Santa Barbara, he applied to Karat for a position as an interviewer. Karat’s focus was interviewing and testing candidates for engineering positions in major tech firms. At first, he was turned down. Not being the type of person who gives up on his goal, JJ taught himself the technical engineering problems that the engineering candidates would have to solve in order to be recommended by Karat for hiring. When JJ explained to Karat the preparation he put himself through in order to work for them, they put him through a series of technical tests. His score was in the top 0.8% of all candidates who ever applied to work at Karat. JJ was hired after his test scores came in. At Karat JJ conducted over 3,000 technical interviews for software engineers. He also worked in quality control wherein he would review the interviews of the Karat interviewers and then meet with them to discuss how they can improve their interviewing skills. JJ collaborated with over 100 Tier-I/III start-ups in designing more proficient interview pipelines, developed an innovative system that scanned and maintained a replica of the entire public internet, and successfully identified and terminated a Chinese website that was publicly posting his company’s interview questions in Chinese. For exposing the website, he received special recognition and increased responsibility by the owners of Karat.

In June, 2020, while still working for Karat, JJ moved back to Vista to live with his mom during the pandemic, while studying for three months for a coding job at Amazon. He took the exams and interviews to enter as a Software Engineer Level 1, despite not having a college diploma. His test and interview results were off the charts, he finished in the top 1% and was offered a job, not as a Level 1, but a Level 2 engineer! In September 2020, he accepted the position at Amazon and began working remotely from home in Vista on the backend service for Amazon’s Alexa; he successfully executed the implementation of Transport Layer Security with Amazon’s BouncyCastleCrypto (https://bouncycastle.org) and so much more.

In late summer of 2023, John was given the opportunity to be a Cryptographer on the trailblazing team of Entropy, which had acquired 25 million dollars in secured funding to work on developing advance threshold cryptography systems for decentralized asset custody on the blockchain. That fall, JJ moved to Brooklyn, New York to be closer to the company’s home base and he rented a highrise Penthouse apartment on the riverfront with a full terrace overlooking the entire NYC skyline. He and his mom watched the 4th of July Macy spectacular fireworks show on the balcony, a video of which he posted on his LinkedIn account. He lived in NYC until December 2023, returning to Vista on sabbatical for 6 months. In May 2024, JJ traveled to Taipei, Vietnam and Dubai for 3 months while working remotely as a Software Engineer for Plume Network. Returning to his home base in Vista once again in August, he was resting, exercising, praying, meditating, listening to Scripture, attending church, eating healthy, taking care of his health and spending time with his family before planning his next great adventure. It was his dream to form his own company, which he named “Light River”.

Besides working for pay, JJ also contributed to his professional community and his efforts were published: In 2023, “Cognitive Warfare, the Formal Model” and “Threshold Based Access Controls for Physical Security Systems”. Charitable at heart, JJ counseled, encouraged and directed young software engineers, including family and friends, with sound advice, resources and training. This was yet another way in which John “gave back”.

A world traveler, John traveled throughout the US, Mexico, Bahamas, Fiji, Europe, Nicaragua, Taipei, Vietnam, Dubai and Tokyo; JJ also lived in and traveled throughout Costa Rica in 2022-23.

Raised a Christian and Catholic, JJ loved God, Jesus and had a special devotion to the Virgin Mary. He had returned to his faith in recent years after initially watching “The Chosen” series. Little by little, his faith was growing stronger and he worshipped God daily and read Scripture, listened to Catholic and Christian podcasts; he often asked us for prayer for his own spiritual growth and healing and he prayed for others, especially his mom’s health. He went to Catholic Mass at St. Mary’s (largest parish in the UAE with over 300,000 parishioners) while living in Dubai. John also began to attend Rhythm Christian church upon his return to Vista in August and was looking forward to going to services with his friend Jack and joining their men’s group. JJ was devoted to Jesus’ Mother, Mary, and her image was his screensaver. He wrote: “She is so beautiful and lovely, thinking of Mary makes me happy, I love her so much she fills my heart with joy”.

Above all, JJ loves his entire family. He was looking forward to seeing his Tata and Sedo in Santa Barbara this month and he talked to his Grandma Delores in Wisconsin on the phone. He is best described as “loving and forgiving”, and he wants unity, not division. JJ recently wrote of his Grandpa Edward: “I said prayers of thanks for him teaching us how important TOGETHERNESS is.” He loves his Mom and Dad profoundly. It can never be stated strongly enough how much JJ loves his big brother Freddie; there are no words to express the depth of that love. JJ is now in heaven watching over Freddie and each member of his family and all his friends.

John is survived by his father John Fred Sahhar, mother Annie Sahhar-Robles, brother Fred John Sahhar III, grandfather Fred H. Sahhar, grandmothers Teri Sahhar and Delores Tomasik, stepfather Francisco Javier Robles, stepsisters Pilar and Sara Robles Talamantes, numerous cousins, aunts, uncles and countless loving friends.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to:

San Diego Humane Society-Oceanside Campus for Cats and Small Pets

572 Airport Road Oceanside, CA 92058

(619)-299-7013 x 2033

Att'n: Andrea Marquez

Donations can be made in the name of John E. Sahhar