Remembering Bob Lee • Hacker News Board

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#191

Post by arcticbull » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:47 AM UTC

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.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#192

Post by strickman » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:48 AM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#193

Post by KingOfCoders » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:56 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #179

bhupy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Used Pico for quite a lot, loved it.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#194

Post by KingOfCoders » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:57 AM UTC

bcantrill wrote: post #41

Thank you very much -- I guess it's understandable given the tragic circumstances of his death, but Bob very much deserves to be remembered as you described him: an engineer's engineer. I first met him at Foo Camp in 2011, and we had a deeply enthralling conversation about building the Square reader. As it turns out, credit card swipes are (were?) fiendishly complicated! (I still tell others the advice that Bob gave…

"dang: Thank you for the black bar today for Bob"

I want to second that.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#195

Post by swagv1 » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:58 AM UTC

hintymad wrote: post #2

What a tragedy. I remember Bob’s code that generates certain numbers: https://www.beust.com/weblog/coding-challenge/ . Bob’s code is in Java, yet uses clever backtracking techniques to achieve the best performance among many solutions in all kinds of languanges.

Put it on his epitaph

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#196

Post by KingOfCoders » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:58 AM UTC

cpurdy wrote: post #139

spullara wrote: post #58

I knew CrazyBob for over 20 years. We met at JavaOne and at the time he was still a consultant living in St Louis. Bob was always the life of the party with a grin like a Cheshire cat. Eventually he got a great job at Google working on the core APIs for Android and created the very lightweight Guice dependency injection framework. We shared a distaste for both Spring and J2EE by that point. At Square he started the C…

Hey Sam, that's actually the JavaOne that I was flying to from a meeting in St Louis. When I got on the plane, I met ... Crazy Bob and the rest is history.

Oh another commentator from back then.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#197

Post by cxie » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 6:58 AM UTC

RIP, Bob He was truly a visionary and an influential figure in the tech world, contributing significantly to platforms like Android, Square, and Cash App. His tragic and untimely passing is a massive loss not only to his loved ones but also to the technology community. I sincerely hope that the authorities will conduct a thorough investigation and bring the perpetrator to justice. May Bob's legacy continue to inspire and drive innovation in the industry.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#198

Post by r12343a_19 » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 7:06 AM UTC

I find the obsession of ignoring how a person died shocking.

Sure, let's remember the person (I never knew before). But... should we pretend he was not stabbed!?

What is wrong with you people?

How a person died is very much relevant for that person and for the world you are living in.

This reminds me of the Ian Murdock suicide. You know, a very much public person in the tech world. Whose death was very much hush hushed because... what? You're not supposed to notice an interaction with the police would unhinge a person (even more)? That he probably also had mental health problems?

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#199

Post by tirsen » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 7:08 AM UTC

I remember the first time meeting Bob. It must be 15 years ago. We had been working together on various open source stuff in the early days of Java open source. I was at some bar in SF and someone introduced me and he said "oh hi Jon I'm Bob!!" and then he gave me a huge hug. Nobody in tech was like that at the time. Bob was a hugger.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#200

Post by noisy_boy » Thu, Apr 06, 2023, 7:12 AM UTC

KingOfCoders wrote: post #108

glaforge wrote: post #86

I believe I met Bob for the first time in 2007. I was already leading the Apache Groovy project back then (started in 2003) and had the chance to do a "tech talk" at Google, in Mountain View, to present the language to Google engineers. In the crowd, there were pretty famous people like Guido Van Rossum (of Python fame), Cédric Beust (TestNG), Romain Guy (on Android), Patrick Chanezon... and of course "Crazy" Bob Lee…

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.