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Remembering Bob Lee

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Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#61

Post by hintymad »

bootsygw wrote: post #54
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.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080912181335/crazybob.org/Beus...

Huh, it seems Bob further optimized his code. The one I remember used the similar approach, but employed a doubly-linked list for backtracking. The pleasant surprise that I got from his code was that recursion plus a linked list still beat those "faster" languages, a classical example of optimizing algorithms first, as beautifully argued in Steven Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#62

Post by staticautomatic »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #52

My understanding is that Bob was a single parent. If you come across any information about a GoFundMe for Bob’s child or similar during your research for this obituary, would you mind reporting back? Email in profile if you’d prefer not to comment with that info. Thank you.

I would be profoundly shocked if this kind of fundraising was necessary. Notwithstanding his amicable divorce some years ago, it would probably be quite an understatement to say he had an abundance of money.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#63

Post by toomuchtodo »

staticautomatic wrote: post #62
toomuchtodo wrote: post #52

My understanding is that Bob was a single parent. If you come across any information about a GoFundMe for Bob’s child or similar during your research for this obituary, would you mind reporting back? Email in profile if you’d prefer not to comment with that info. Thank you.

I would be profoundly shocked if this kind of fundraising was necessary. Notwithstanding his amicable divorce some years ago, it would probably be quite an understatement to say he had an abundance of money.

Fair. Asked to default to action. Better to ask and be told no than not ask at all. I try to make no assumptions about someone’s means.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#64

Post by hobr »

tomandrews88 wrote: post #56
hobr wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met him around the same time and we did the conference circuit together for a fair few years. I vividly remember being sucked into his craziness more than a few times in my formative years! A fun, welcoming guy and an incredible technologist.

> being sucked into his craziness Just curious what was he like in terms of the craziness? Partying? Skydiving?

My experience was the partying. He seemed to have boundless energy for it and it was infectious.

I remember arriving at a conference with serious jet lag and just wanting to sleep. I grabbed dinner with a few of the other speakers and Bob's energy was enough to turn dinner into drinks and drinks into skipping the whole night's sleep.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#65

Post by kylecordes »

I was acquainted with Bob over 20 years ago, when he was a software developer in St. Louis, attending various St. Louis area developer meetings. I remember at the time thinking that he was a startling combination of very personable and incredibly sharp. I was not surprised at all to hear he headed west to Google, made his way up to CTO of Square, and onward from there.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#66

Post by aboodman »

MrDresden wrote: post #12
irrational wrote: post #3

Why was he called crazybob?

According to footnote 121 in Chet Haase's book 'Androids' Bob had used this nickname since highschool and even used it as his corporate email address. Does not answer where it originally came from, but he seems to have enjoyed the nickname.

I read that it originated from his waterpolo days.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#68

Post by aboodman »

I didn't know him super well despite that we overlapped at Google. I remember he was omnipresent on the java related mailinglist and had a huge impact on style and libraries in that language.

After starting my current company, Bob messaged me about once every other month asking how my product was doing, offering insights, and asking how he could help.

It never seemed pushy, just that he really believed in what we were/are doing and wanted to be involved. It was always nice to get his message.

Reading all the amazing impacts he had on people I now regret not getting to know him better. He seems to have been a really great person and engineer.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#69

Post by salgorithm »

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 interns and I decided to expand this email functionality by building a "pay by Tweet" feature with essentially the same mechanics (https://twitter.com/hackweek9bot).

We downloaded the codebase (I believe it was called "Franklin") and found ourselves struggling to get it up and running. I entered the room where the Cash team was seated and started asking a random guy questions about the dependency injection library (Guice) and various other topics. After about half an hour of answering my questions, he compiled a list of documentation for me to read and sent it to me via email. I returned to my Hack Week team and forwarded the email to them. "Oh, dude, that's our CTO," one of my teammates informed me. At that moment, I was convinced I would be in trouble for bothering an executive. However, instead of that, I ended up receiving a fist bump during our science fair-style project presentation. He was a genuinely cool guy.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#70

Post by bgirard »

pizlonator wrote: post #57

I had a lot of warm interactions with bob. Here’s a great one: over beers at a certain venerable Silicon Valley establishment, over a decade ago, bob taught me about what a weak map should really do: keep a value alive when both the map and the key are alive. It blew my mind. This led me to eventually coming up with the idea that a GC is a data flow solver rather than merely a graph search. Something that is at the h…

> bob taught me about what a weak map should really do: keep a value alive when both the map and the key are alive. It blew my mind.

Can you share more details? That's so counter intuitive to how I think of WeakMaps and I would like to know more.

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