We need a Dave Cutler facts equivalent too. But the ppl who could have made this are probably retired or
The Jeff Dean Facts
101–110 of 193 posts
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#102Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was…
> My only regret is that I targeted the site specifically at Jeff and not Sanjay Ghemawat.
Later version of the site was generalized so that people can submit facts for any user. I think Jeff Dean still has all the funniest fact though.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#103Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was…
What makes it feel a little racist?
>"Jeff Dean Facts" sort of rolls off the tongue easier that "Sanjay Ghemawat Facts"
The reason it rolls off the tongue easier is because of the familiarity with names of that form. It is making a choice to favour a personal cultural similarity. It clearly wasn't done with malice, but being reflective about it and noticing that it happened is a good thing.
When people talk about privilege, this is a large part of what people mean. There's no intended bias, it is just an honest choice, but all of our choices are based upon our opinions that will inherently have biases of some sort. One factor of privilege is when those choices disproportionately fall your way because decisions end up being made by people who you share a cultural upbringing with. Their intuitive decisions value what you value.
Sometimes the only way you can deal with that is by acknowledging your intuitions contain that implicit bias and dispassionately try and balance them as best you can.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#104Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was…
> but in retrospect this feels a little racist. :(
It’s not racist. It’s just to do with name length.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes it feel a little racist?
>"Jeff Dean Facts" sort of rolls off the tongue easier that "Sanjay Ghemawat Facts" The reason it rolls off the tongue easier is because of the familiarity with names of that form. It is making a choice to favour a personal cultural similarity. It clearly wasn't done with malice, but being reflective about it and noticing that it happened is a good thing. When people talk about privilege, this is a large part of what…
It’s to do with the length of the name. My own name is polysyllabic and also wouldn’t work as a “Fact”, and I’m as white as they come.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#106Hey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them. It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was…
Hi Kenton! I was the recent grad you handed this web app off to after you built it, so I expanded Jeff Dean Facts so that anyone could create and rate facts about anyone at Google :). There were a ton of team in-jokes added before I stopped working on it - O(5k) IIRC! :)
This web app was also how I learned the pain of maintaining a live web service with a lot of ever-changing dependencies. How I sighed when the AppEngine version changed and I had to fix things again...
I handed it off again before I left Google but I have no memory of who that was to unfortunately :(.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"Jeff Dean Facts" sort of rolls off the tongue easier that "Sanjay Ghemawat Facts" The reason it rolls off the tongue easier is because of the familiarity with names of that form. It is making a choice to favour a personal cultural similarity. It clearly wasn't done with malice, but being reflective about it and noticing that it happened is a good thing. When people talk about privilege, this is a large part of what…
It’s to do with the length of the name. My own name is polysyllabic and also wouldn’t work as a “Fact”, and I’m as white as they come.
That's kind of the point. In a culture where names commonly have a lot of syllables, the length of the name is much less of an issue. That tiny discomfort of the extra effort to process more syllables disappears when it's not considered 'extra'
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s to do with the length of the name. My own name is polysyllabic and also wouldn’t work as a “Fact”, and I’m as white as they come.
That's kind of the point. In a culture where names commonly have a lot of syllables, the length of the name is much less of an issue. That tiny discomfort of the extra effort to process more syllables disappears when it's not considered 'extra'
I’m not sure I agree. I expect that an Indian would similarly be more likely to coin the term “Krish Singh Facts” than they would “Sanjay Ghemawat Facts”, in exactly the same way we do.
I’d be interested to hear from someone from a different culture to verify whether this is true or not.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#109What does "readability" mean? It's mentioned in several of these jokes: "binary readability", etc.
readability grants a code reviewer the power to approve changes in a specific language
I was wondering if someone was going to ask. It's the most bizzare aspect of code reviews at Google.
And "Readability" doesn't mean you are good at a language, it means you are good at it in the way Google uses it. C++ readability is the poster child of this. Borgcron, not so much.
Re: The Jeff Dean Facts
#110What does "readability" mean? It's mentioned in several of these jokes: "binary readability", etc.
readability grants a code reviewer the power to approve changes in a specific language
A bit more detail: long ago, before the time of the Great Brace War, people wrote code using all sorts of styles: tabs/spaces, short or long variable/function names, Hungarian notation or not, comments or not, long blocks or short, and so on. You could often tell which of your teammates wrote a block of code simply by newline usage. This made it hard to read and contribute code in a less familiar part of the codebase.
Google mitigated this problem at scale by introducing the concept of "readability" for each language (C++, Java, and Python, simpler times). If you had readability, you could approve another person's change for that language. If you didn't, you could still review the code, but the reviewee also had to go find someone else with readability.
After you'd accumulated a certain number of commits in a language, you could try to get your own readability by bundling up your CLs (changelists) and submitting them to the readability queue, where a certain group of senior people with readability would evaluate whether your code was sufficiently idiomatic. This process could take months, or even years if you didn't write much in a particular language. In any event, it felt like a real achievement to get readability.
The upshot of all this was that most code at Google felt authorless in a good way: if you knew and expected Google style, all the codebase felt the same, and you could concentrate on the logic flow rather than the regional dialect. And needless to say all the energy wasted on whose style was best was squelched in the readability queue.
This is all past tense because I last wrote code for Google more than 10 years ago, and I'm sure the process has changed since then. Code formatters, shared editor defaults, and presubmit checks have surely automated away a lot of the toil, and there's much less of a monorepo culture these days, so there are probably more style dialects (in addition to many, many more permitted languages).