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An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

bradfitz.com

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Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#101

Post by ValentineC »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #53
nostrademons wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how fleeting software fame is. Perhaps that's just a special case of how fleeting fame is. Folks who came of age in the early 2000s certainly remember him - he founded LiveJournal; wrote memcached, MogileFS, Gearman, and a bunch of other prominent software packages; authored the first version of the OpenID spec (which eventually became OAuth, which you see all over the web); and was one of the early…

That's true; some of those folks just left the software industry, though, I think, or are at or approaching retirement age. Tangentially, it's still interesting -- and faintly depressing -- to me how much I think LiveJournal got right about social media that its bigger successors, well, don't, specifically related to privacy. LJ users had comparatively immense control over who could read and reply to posts. This isn'…

> This isn't to say that Twitter and Facebook don't get a lot of things right, too, in terms of ease of posting, lack of friction, and (for both better and worse) monetization, but I wish "granularity of acces control" had been a lesson we'd carried forward.

Facebook had incredible granularity with regard to who could view one's posts — then they nerfed it by letting the people who are on your "lists" view who else is on them. (I'm private enough to not want people to know that they're on my Close Friends list with 30 other people.)

There was a way to get around this nerf by including a "smart list" in your set, but Facebook recently removed "smart lists" altogether.

My Facebook post privacy settings are a mess now, and I also gave up and stopped posting anything personal.

(I wanted to add that I used LiveJournal a lot in the early 2000's, and their friend list feature was amazing.)

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#102

Post by User23 »

chrshawkes wrote: post #89
xwowsersx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate it so much.

So many companies, even non-tech companies with tech divisions adopted this plague and now it seems there is no turning back. I find the constant movement to be the biggest distraction over noise.

If you have diagnosed ADHD and are forced to work in an extremely distracting environment like an open floor plan then talk to your manager and HR about getting an accommodation. They will work with you to find some reasonable way to limit the distraction based on the particulars of your workplace.

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#103

Post by mikepurvis »

bradfitz wrote: post #34
NhanH wrote: post #26

To Brad: What is your plan with regard to perkeep? My understanding is that it is your 20% project, and seems like you are one of the main force keeping it alive. Just asking since I have multiple servers running it right now, and will need to migrate if it is going to be abandoned.

See: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/perkeep/Kqvh2dJVmoo/9N4YXAuX... I no longer pay Mathieu to work on it full time, and my time is tempered by 2.5 and 0.5 year old kids. I still use it, but don't have time to add to it much. Others work on it a bit. Mathieu and I did work on https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp just recently, to fix the Google Photos importer. So it's still moving a bit. Others still work on it t…

So glad to hear this.

I also have young kids and struggle to even find the time to set up and use a Perkeep instance much less learn the internals or hack on it. But yeah, the whole business of de-cloudifying our lives and reclaiming privacy is going to be so important in coming years and decades.

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#104

Post by fanf2 »

cousin_it wrote: post #61

Livejournal was the most fun social network I ever used. The focus on moderately long texts rather than tweets/photos/videos, the one-way friending system where you could add anyone to your reading list, and the strict chronological ordering of the reading list were a winning combination. I wonder what's the best such network existing today?

https://www.dreamwidth.org is LJ's successor

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#105

Post by chipotle_coyote »

nostrademons wrote: post #66
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true; some of those folks just left the software industry, though, I think, or are at or approaching retirement age. Tangentially, it's still interesting -- and faintly depressing -- to me how much I think LiveJournal got right about social media that its bigger successors, well, don't, specifically related to privacy. LJ users had comparatively immense control over who could read and reply to posts. This isn'…

When Google+ was under development in 2011, I remarked to my team "So, our differentiator from Facebook is...basically everything that LiveJournal had in 2002?"

Heh. While I never really got into Google+, its "circles" idea definitely reminded me of LJ -- and it seemed like a great idea. It seems like it might not have been communicated very well to the audience.

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#106

Post by ibeckermayer »

aswanson wrote: post #93
xwowsersx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate it so much.

What dolt would think that more noise & distraction would make for a more productive workplace where the product requires sustained periods of focus? It's literally the dumbest thing you can do in that circumstance.

I think that’s all just propaganda and the real reason for it is so that management can always keep an eye on their code cattle

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#107

Post by SamWhited »

crystaldev wrote: post #28

Good luck to Brad. It sounds like the last twelve years of his life were pure Google, it's a big change. > I don't want to get stuck in a comfortable rut. (And Google certainly is comfortable, except for open floor plans.) It's oddly comforting that even programmers of Brad's caliber are forced to cope with open offices. When can this fad end.

> When can this fad end

It's not a fad, businesses aren't doing this just because it's trendy and cool and they think people will like it, they're doing it because it saves them a fortune and they care more about their bottom line than their employees well being.

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#108

Post by chipotle_coyote »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #78
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true; some of those folks just left the software industry, though, I think, or are at or approaching retirement age. Tangentially, it's still interesting -- and faintly depressing -- to me how much I think LiveJournal got right about social media that its bigger successors, well, don't, specifically related to privacy. LJ users had comparatively immense control over who could read and reply to posts. This isn'…

At least one part of it is the faith that users can be smart people, rather than the current approach to customization UX which seems to be "take it all away from the fools".

I think part of that comes from the (reasonable) assumption that the simpler you make your UX, the less friction there is for people using your service. But it would be nice to see someone work on bringing more granularity and flexibility back to social media, even at the cost of a little more friction.

(I also suspect some of it comes from people looking at Apple's historic "make simple things simple" approach to UX and taking the wrong lessons from it, which arguably includes latter-day Apple, but that's a whole different post...)

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#109

Post by pjmlp »

crystaldev wrote: post #28

Good luck to Brad. It sounds like the last twelve years of his life were pure Google, it's a big change. > I don't want to get stuck in a comfortable rut. (And Google certainly is comfortable, except for open floor plans.) It's oddly comforting that even programmers of Brad's caliber are forced to cope with open offices. When can this fad end.

It has been a fad as long as I can remember. Doing this since the mid-80's.

Re: An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google

#110

Post by bradknowles »

markstos wrote: post #88
biomcgary wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've followed Brad Fitz over the years because I also started in Perl and ended up in Go. His intellectual curiosity and interest in doing cool things well shines through. He is a great example of the leader-by-example category.

Notable that the word "Perl" appears nowhere in his write up of technical legacy. He was once Chief Architect at Six Apart, developers of the Perl-based Movable Type blogging platform which once rivaled Wordpress.

I remember Six Apart and Movable Type. I always wondered what happened to them.

Thanks for helping make that connection for me!

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