I remember fondly interacting with him quite a bit 20 years ago early (?) in his "crazy bob" phase on theserverside.com, and the epic flamewars around Java backend frameworks and app servers. Quite a shock to hear of his death.
Remembering Bob Lee
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Re: Remembering Bob Lee
#32No one in java community can forget Crazybob. He was one of the engineers that showed path to many on how to move from being engineer to executive. RIP.
Re: Remembering Bob Lee
#33Bob was a nice guy. We had an overlapping tenure at Google in the 2000s. He was one of the original authors of the Guice dependency injection framework: https://github.com/google/guice . When I was earning Java readability at Google, I was fortunate to have had him assigned as a reviewer. Having the review work so smoothly alleviated a lot of the imposter syndrome I felt at the time. I felt like a million bucks after…
I've never met a dependency injection framework I liked, but I hated Guice least. Credit to the minds who conceived it.
Re: Remembering Bob Lee
#34Bob was a nice guy. We had an overlapping tenure at Google in the 2000s. He was one of the original authors of the Guice dependency injection framework: https://github.com/google/guice . When I was earning Java readability at Google, I was fortunate to have had him assigned as a reviewer. Having the review work so smoothly alleviated a lot of the imposter syndrome I felt at the time. I felt like a million bucks after…
I've never met a dependency injection framework I liked, but I hated Guice least. Credit to the minds who conceived it.
One of my old teams also liked to mispronounce it as "Gucci" for extra style
Re: Remembering Bob Lee
#35I first met Crazy Bob when I was onboarding as a junior engineer. He spent a good half hour answering my questions about how to go about work, grow into my role, and explore the things that interested me.
He was the busy CTO, built up the core service container (which I later maintained), but he spent time giving me advice and encouraging me. He was an instrumental figure in getting rid of my imposter syndrome at my first big role.
We met several times after that, and he was always kind.
Thank you for caring, Bob. You made an impact in my career and you're gone much too soon. Your code, fingerprints, and even Crazy Bob moniker are powering billions of dollars of transactions and will be there perhaps longer than all of us.
Re: Remembering Bob Lee
#36I remember fondly interacting with him quite a bit 20 years ago early (?) in his "crazy bob" phase on theserverside.com, and the epic flamewars around Java backend frameworks and app servers. Quite a shock to hear of his death.
Those were the days!
Re: Remembering Bob Lee
#37Bob was an acquaintance of mine. A crazy dude and a good man. It’s hard to describe the feeling of seeing his face show up on Apple news with this headline.
Re: Remembering Bob Lee
#38His story about becoming the Code Red Vigilante (writing a program to help stop the spread of the Code Red worm) is a fun flash back to the early 2000s hacking scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ElYs3hXSkI
bruh the screen savers is such a blast from the past and peak late 90s/early 00s tech. It's crazy to think Martin Sargent co-hosted with Digg's co-founder Kevin Rose quite a bit on that show.
Re: Remembering Bob Lee
#39Hey y'all, just wanted to raise my hand -- my name is St. John Barned-Smith and I'm a reporter at the Chronicle. I'm working on an obit of Lee and the impact he had on the tech community and on his friends and colleagues. Some of you have written quite powerfully about that -- if you'd be willing to share an anecdote/memory with me, I'd very much appreciate it.
Feel free to message me at stjohn.smith@sfchronicle.com
Re: Remembering Bob Lee
#40The related ongoing merged thread is Bob Lee, former CTO of Square, has died after being stabbed in San Francisco - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35448899. I've converted aEJ04Izw5HYm's comment from that thread into this top-level submission so that comments and memories about Bob Lee can have a place of their own.
As for discussion of the event itself, (1) please keep it in the other thread, not this one; and (2) please don't go off the flamewar deep end when you do. The worst stuff in that thread is pretty bad and not at all in the intended spirit of this site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Edit: I've gone through that thread now and tried to move all the relevant comments here. If you notice a good comment about Bob Lee languishing in another thread, let us know (hn@ycombinator.com is best) and we'll bring it over.