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Remembering Bob Lee

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#211

Post by jessewilson »

cpurdy wrote: post #156
jessewilson wrote: post #146

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.

Thanks for sharing this. Typical Bob move making me blush even after he’s gone.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#212

Post by conqueso »

I didn't know Bob or know who he was until reading this horrible news. After reading these stories of how he brought people together and had a strict "no-judgement" policy, I'm inspired to try and make a shift toward that mindset. My condolences to his friends and family.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#213

Post by glaforge »

noisy_boy wrote: post #200
KingOfCoders wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a thread with all those people from the mid-2000s.

Crazy thread indeed; I am writing Groovy code and a past lead of Apache Groovy turns up to pay tribute.

And in my current project, I'm using Bob's creation, the @Inject annotation that he introduced when he was leading the work on JSR-330!

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#214

Post by jodah »

While I didn't know Bob personally, he did he an impact on me.

Bob was the first person I looked up to as an open source engineer early in my career. I studied his code closely, and learned a lot from the way he was able to distill complex problems into beautifully crafted APIs. Those learnings, along with some of his principles of software design, shaped my own work, including in open source, to this day. When Bob went on to great success I was not surprised in the least. He was a great engineer and deserved to still be with us.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#215

Post by jodah »

arcticbull wrote: post #191
salgorithm wrote: post #69

The anecdote I always share about my 2013 internship at Square involves Bob. It took place during the quarterly Hack Week, when the company allowed everyone to take a break from work and build whatever they liked. Cash App (known as "Square Cash" back then) had just been launched, and the only way to send money was by emailing someone with a dollar amount in the subject line and cc'ing cash@square.com. My fellow inte…

I remember your hack week project :) Bob interviewed me, and taught me to be a good interviewer. I don't know if other folks remember him for this, but he taught half the company how to interview. This skill proved very helpful in the rest of my career. Thanks, Bob. You'll be missed.

I would love to learn how Bob approached interviewing, if you've ever up to writing this up!

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#216

Post by sowbug »

Vayl wrote: post #209
dumpster_fire wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a system design question. High throughout on the scale of Google means you'd laser any log ingestion service to death. He was probably looking for a distributed way to label logs and build an ingestion service that shards regionally with high availability, but still able to search and filter within an acceptable time for debugging purposes.

How can I learn about these topics? Junior self-taught dev, I read these things and kind of see what they're about, but I wouldn't know where to even start with this...

You can practice the mindset by writing a toy solution for the problem, then listing the reasons why you consider your solution just a toy. This develops a fundamental skill of engineering, which isn't understanding whether a system will fail (it will always eventually fail, even if the first reason is that the sun explodes), but rather when and how it will fail. You can make a whole career out of pulling on that thread.

(I worked at Google with Bob in the mid-2000s. I might have interacted with him once or twice on the internal Java and Guice mailing lists, but never met him in person. He was supremely helpful and knowledgeable, and I admired him from a distance.)

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#217

Post by squirtlebonflow »

joering2 wrote: post #174
lpolovets wrote: post #82

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)

But what do you log when there is a failure? A huge call stack, a huge object, some kind of information about what went wrong, what?

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#218

Post by sameb »

I was introduced to Bob through Guice. My company at the time -- LimeWire -- decided to adopt Guice, and he graciously answered questions and accepted patches. Bob's a large reason I ended up working at Google. I started a month or two after he left, and was always frustrated that I didn't get a chance to work alongside him.

When I eventually took over maintenance of Guice, I was pleasantly surprised at how Bob was gracious with someone else "owning" his creation.

I occasionally chatted with him over the years, and he was always just such a kind and wonderful person.

I will greatly miss him, and especially miss the lost opportunity to really get to know him.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#219

Post by kevinb9n »

harper wrote: post #168

I have 4 memories that keep sticking out about bob. I shared them on twitter - but I will share them here with a bit more color. They are a bit different cuz they are not really engineering related, but will give you some idea of his character and how he interacted with folks: 1) when I was CTO of the Obama Campaign I was scared and lost. bob helped me so much. helped me be a better CTO. helped me sell a lot of weird…

Thank you so much for posting these

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#220

Post by kevinb9n »

iradik wrote: post #14

So sad. I met Bob once at an interview at Square in 2012 for the final interview. I believe he was the inventor of Google’s guice dependency injection library and the dagger library. I bombed the interview. I liked him anyway. RIP.

Just to fill in some detail, Dagger was originally by jessewilson, but Bob was certainly highly involved. They were working together a lot then.
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