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Remembering Bob Lee

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#81

Post by dang »

eldritch_4ier wrote: post #46

[flagged]

I'm sorry that I confused things by copying a comment into a top-level submission (I don't think we've ever done that before). aEJ04Izw5HYm only posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35455060. I converted it, as JamesMcMinn already pointed out, because it was a natural root for a separate thread focused on Bob Lee personally.

While I have you though: could you please stop using HN for ideological battle? It looks like your account has been doing that a lot. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for—regardless of which ideology you favor. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#82

Post by lpolovets »

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 of the question was something like "Imagine you have a very high throughput service, and you want to log notable events and errors, but not log terabytes (or petabytes) of data about successful executions. How would you design a logging system around these constraints?" We had a fun discussion about this question for about 30 minutes, and I remember being even more excited to work at Google after seeing that people like Bob worked there.

RIP :(

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#83

Post by CyberDildonics »

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.

Are you planning on donating money to a child of the person who was the head of a company that made 10 billion USD in revenue and almost 3 billion USD in profit last year?

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/cash-app-statistics/

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#84

Post by Lightbody »

I've known Bob for over 20 years. I can't say I fortunate enough to call him a very close friend, but we hacked on open source together over the years and evolved into chatting about startups and entrepreneurship.

We would get lunch and catch up from time to time. He was always friendly, welcoming, and supportive. Truly a good person.

I cried for a long time this morning. I'm heartbroken; for his family, for the whole world that is worse off with his loss; and for myself.

I will miss him.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#86

Post by glaforge »

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, who was working on Guice and the Android libraries. Very humbling.

I then met him a few times at JavaOne, and maybe some other Java-related conferences or parties! I didn't know him very well though, but I highly respected him. However we had some heated-discussions on programming languages! Bob thought Groovy wouldn't last long, but Groovy is still there 20 years later. He was rooting for BeanShell...

Oh time flies!

It's so sad, so terrible! I often walked those streets myself (the Google office is right around the corner)

My thoughts go to his family, his two daughters.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#87

Post by asfasfo »

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…

You forgot to mention that the dependency injection library, Guice, that you were asking about was created by Bob himself!

CashApp's monolith is still called Franklin today.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#88

Post by aj_icracked »

I met Bob the evening he launched square cash at a Giants game. Incredibly friendly and approachable guy. He walked in the room and introduced himself by sending me $1 over email by CC'ing cash@squareup.com. I remember thinking, holy cow we have the CTO of Square hanging out with us on the day of one of the biggest product launches he orchestrated - what a time to be alive.

I spent the next few months / years keeping in touch, grabbing beers, and unsuccessfully trying to get him to join my company (iCracked) at the time. I always loved catching up with him and getting the pulse of what was happening in silicon valley. He had a few antique arcade machines and would light up when talking about them.

The last time I was able to catch up with him was we randomly ran into each other on a beach in Mexico a year or so ago - we got together for dinner and traded stories (this was peak covid). I'm tearing up writing this. You'll be missed Bob.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#89

Post by veeti »

beastman82 wrote: post #17
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.

Exact same experience in 2010. He was internet famous for guice, CTO of Square and former lead of Android library dev. Asked about my flight and was generally just friendly. Before that I had even cold-emailed him about something related to the Square CC reader and he responded. Anyway I didn't get the job either, but it was impossible not to like him in my very limited experience. Terribly tragic.

The extent and popularity of Square libraries in Android development is crazy. Whenever you download an app I think there's a pretty good chance some of Bob's code is in there.

Re: Remembering Bob Lee

#90

Post by pizlonator »

bgirard wrote: post #70
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.

I called it a “weak map” rather than “WeakMap” deliberately. Bob was describing what he wanted, not what he got.

However, if memory serves, the JS weak map has the semantics bob wanted: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

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