Who passed away amongst Monero core devs? You had a dev older than me?
warptangent was a talented coder and active Monero developer but not "core team" member and certainly not a forum personality (I think he may have posted once or twice). I'm pretty sure he was younger than you. Out of respect for his family's privacy I would rather not go into further details about his death (and I also don't know that much)
Announcement was here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4c9wh8/a_fond_goodbye_to_our_friend_and_contributor/Steemit has a lot of JS I assume at least on the client side? Are they writing the server side of Steemit in C++?
The blockchain node, which includes most of the core logic for managing accounts, rewards, tokens, etc. is all C++. The web site back end is closed source so we don't know anything about it, or at least I don't. They have several developers (full time I believe) with apparently different specialities.