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Remembering Bob Lee

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Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#171
post #156

Bob & Krista invited my wife and I to a Medieval Faire and I was struck by just how much energy he had. He rented a king & queen costume for the day and carried himself to match his attire. I’ll miss him forever. https://publicobject.com/2023/04/05/bob-bent-the-universe/

You were one of his favorite people that he ever got to work with. Even years later he couldn't stop gushing about how proud he was of you. No exaggeration.

Whatva wonderful sentiment to relate back to someone. :)

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#172
Bob was crazy. In the best way.

In the early 2000s, I first encountered Bob through the Java open source community. He had a knack of being able to go deep on a tough problem and emerge with a wonderfully elegant solution. This was a time when software was getting increasingly complex, and so did the knowledge required to understand it, yet Bob consistently bucked the trend and made things seems simple. He would tackle problems that scared others. He was crazy. Crazy Bob.

At one point we had a rivalry working on two open source projects competing to solve the same problem. When we first met face to face, I was nervous there may be confrontation, yet he was friendly, full of energy, and excited that we shared the passion for the same problem. We brainstormed many ideas and both went away feeling great! His crazy energy amplified my own and passion for software.

Shortly after, I joined Google because of Bob. Over the years since, he and I did our best to recruit each other for nearly every company either of us worked at - we just never got the timing right, yet I was always hopeful we'd figure it out eventually.

Even in CxO roles, whenever Bob and I met we'd geek out on all sorts of tech problems, ranging from API design, to embedded C firmware tricks, to financial protocols, to graph network theory, to hardware development. He loved tech, and his eyes lit up whenever we found a shared passion.

Bob was one of those few people who was incredibly smart, could see the problem in different ways, energize everyone around them, and make you want to be a better you.

Crazy Bob. You'll be missed.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most murders are for a reason, not 'senseless'. THIS NEEDS TO STOP. 'Surveillance footage reviewed by The Standard appears to show Bob Lee, a 43-year-old former top executive at Square, walking on the sidewalk up Main Street away from the Bay Bridge at around 2:30 a.m., holding his side with one hand and using his phone with the other. Lee then crosses the intersection at Harrison Street toward a parked white Camry w…

[flagged]

We don't really know what olivermarks meant by "reasons". Possibly he meant exactly the same that you think. There isn't enough information to tell.

In any case, please don't respond to a bad comment (or one that you feel is bad) by breaking the site guidelines yourself. It only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#174

I interviewed at Google almost 20 years ago, and Bob was one of 5-6 interviewers that I had. I don't remember the other interviewers, but I remember Bob. He was very high energy, and posed a really fun, original question about selective logging. The kind of question that you could tell was born out of his personal experiences at Google, not just something he found in a "ten linked list questions" blog post. The gist…

This is very interesting but I fail to see an issue. You listen to all incoming log messages and only store != success. What am I missing (obviously)

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#175
I don't have much unique to write but want to say something anyway.

Bob and I overlapped at Google and on Android and I think we even shared a manager for some time. It seems we overlapped at at least one Foo Camp as well.

Bob always seemed chipper, excited, friendly, patient, and happy.

I've been searching my email to re-read our various interactions over the years. We started following each other on Twitter in 2008. In 2012, a friend offered to put me on the guest list for a Stripe party. I replied that "Crazybob already put me on :-)". In 2020 we were DMing about custom-designed front doors and whether my friend also wanted to make him one. He was thinking Shou Sugi Ban style.

We're the same age, both dads. I also used to live in SF and visit sometimes. It all seems so surreal.

I hadn't seen him in person in ages but regularly saw him post to Twitter.

Like I said, nothing much unique to say. But I'll miss him. He was good people.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#176

At first, I didn't like Bob Lee. Then I met him. I didn't know him when he joined my AdWords team in '04. He was the next to join after me. He was 24 (I was 29) and he was known by a fun nickname and he had already co-written a BOOK ferchrissakes. Worse, he was going to be working on the stuff that I had asked to work on (but had been told we didn't have time for). I had him sized up all right. I didn't like hotshot…

this is kinda story of life too, huh. I try to be open. We are all mostly great people on this planet. Too bad about his passing.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#177
I worked with Bob at Square around 2011. Somehow we always came down on the opposite sides of tech decisions - but I still think about those arguments, his point of view was always something I could learn from, even if we didn’t reach the same conclusions. I never understood why he asked ruby coders to implement linked-lists, but I’m glad I got the chance to work with him.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did some googling today, sorry for my comment! (But mine was one of the nicer ones ;-) "Obie is one of those Ruby developers with no programming experience" http://blog.crazybob.org/2007/09/gavin-king-on-activerecord....

The tech has changed, but the Flamewars were just as hot 2 decades ago! Bob was never afraid to have an opinion. A bit sad to see all those deadlinks in the comments though. From what I recall sites like JRoller were captured by the Way Back machine, but images seem to have been lost. At least they were for my blog at the time.

Yes, JRoller, TheServerSide, I remember when they launched, I think I got paid for writing a review or something, "lost like tears in the rain".

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#179
post #107
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot to mention that the dependency injection library, Guice, that you were asking about was created by Bob himself! CashApp's monolith is still called Franklin today.

Ex-Square chiming in (I fondly remember Project Franklin), he was also arguably the inventor of modern dependency injection as we know it! https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=330

There was PicoContainer before Guice. Maybe it didn't count as modern though.
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