[HN Gopher] Remembering Bob Lee
___________________________________________________________________
Remembering Bob Lee
I want to draw attention to Bob Lee, a well-respected technologist
and prototype hacker, always curious and sharing lots of
interesting technical developments. He was a great role model for
how Engineers should be respected in an executive capacity as he
advanced his career from 'Software' to 'Product'. His efforts
contributed to technology used by millions. What happened to him is
tragic and wrong; he deserved better. Thank you, I'll miss you
'crazybob'. Please share your stories featuring Bob Lee, who I'm
sure would like to be remembered for his contributions rather than
as a victim of this unfortunate awful event.
Author : aEJ04Izw5HYm
Score : 1192 points
Date : 2023-04-05 17:11 UTC (5 hours ago)
| sine_break wrote:
| He leaves behind a legacy of innovation and passion that will
| continue to inspire us all. Bob, we will never forget you and the
| impact you made on our lives. Rest in peace.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| 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.
| hobr wrote:
| 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.
| tomandrews88 wrote:
| > being sucked into his craziness
|
| Just curious what was he like in terms of the craziness?
| Partying? Skydiving?
| hobr wrote:
| 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.
| obiefernandez wrote:
| Those were the days!
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Did some googling today, sorry for my comment! (But mine was
| one of the nicer ones ;-)
|
| "Obie is one of those Ruby developers with no programming
| experience"
|
| http://blog.crazybob.org/2007/09/gavin-king-on-
| activerecord....
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| The tech has changed, but the Flamewars were just as hot 2
| decades ago! Bob was never afraid to have an opinion.
|
| A bit sad to see all those deadlinks in the comments
| though. From what I recall sites like JRoller were captured
| by the Way Back machine, but images seem to have been lost.
| At least they were for my blog at the time.
| thedogeye wrote:
| Can't imagine his kids hearing this news today. Just breaks me
| thinking about it. Hold your loved ones close.
| aboodman wrote:
| 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.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| This is the story, despite all of the insane shit that's already
| going on in SF, is the thing that is making me consider leaving
| the bay area for good. Like, I see wretchedness almost everywhere
| every single day. But this, this is just insane. I used to walk
| around the Tenderloin at night sometimes, god I was so stupid. I
| am wasting my time here. There are much better cities out there.
| salgorithm wrote:
| 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.
| asfasfo wrote:
| 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.
| bhupy wrote:
| 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
| lchengify wrote:
| Wow. Ok. Thank you for sharing this.
|
| Guice was one of my first "aha" moments at Google about how
| modern Java could be written without a million XML files. I
| later took Guice to multiple other companies and projects
| back when I used to sling Java code for a living.
|
| It seems like such a small thing, but it had a huge influence
| on my career right out of college.
| therein wrote:
| Yup, Banklin and Franklin.
|
| Bob Lee will be missed.
| [deleted]
| ng12 wrote:
| Love this story. This was how I remember him too; I didn't know
| he was our CTO until after a long conversation with him about
| some technical minutiae.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I suspect many CTOs long for this kind of work. But their time
| is usually taken up with administrative duties.
| aj_icracked wrote:
| 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.
| kasperni wrote:
| Bob created Guice [1] and was involved in a number of JSR
| specifications. Bob also lead the initial development of Androids
| core libraries before moving on to the payment industry. He was a
| well known figure in the Java world. RIP.
|
| [1] https://github.com/google/guice
| lpolovets wrote:
| 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 :(
| mrdonbrown wrote:
| I met and worked with Bob in open source work in the mid 2000's,
| mostly with what would become Guice. He wrote this framework,
| again, thanks to his distaste of Spring and we put an early
| version of it what would become Apache Struts 2. Man, if I ever
| got cocky in my programming skills, I just needed to read that
| Guice prototype code and I was quickly humbled. The best part is
| he was just an awesome guy to be around. Very friendly,
| accepting, humble, and a ton of fun. I still talk about this guy
| I know who was married on the bridge of the Star Trek Enterprise
| 1701 D (at the MGM before it was torn down)...
| benburton wrote:
| I never met Bob Lee, but I was a huge fan. Google Guice was
| exceptionally useful for non-Spring-based dependency injection in
| the early 00s. I don't know if Bob had his hands in the Google
| Collections API, but that in combination with Guice really made
| Java engineering in the JDK 6 days much more bearable.
|
| What a devastating, senseless tragedy.
| olivermarks wrote:
| Most murders are for a reason, not 'senseless'.
|
| THIS NEEDS TO STOP.
|
| 'Surveillance footage reviewed by The Standard appears to show
| Bob Lee, a 43-year-old former top executive at Square, walking
| on the sidewalk up Main Street away from the Bay Bridge at
| around 2:30 a.m., holding his side with one hand and using his
| phone with the other.
|
| Lee then crosses the intersection at Harrison Street toward a
| parked white Camry with its lights flashing, the video appears
| to show. Lee lifts his shirt--as if to show the driver his
| wound and ask for help--and then falls to the ground after the
| car drives away.
|
| He then gets up and walks back down Main Street toward the Bay
| Bridge before falling to the ground in front of 403 Main St.,
| an apartment building known as the Portside'.
|
| Very distressing.
|
| https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/video-appears-to-sho...
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Bob 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.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| Sounds like such a huge loss.
|
| Does anyone know where the moniker 'crazybob' originated from?
| zamnos wrote:
| his waterpolo days
| andromeduck wrote:
| Also invented guice.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Someone I didn't know IRL but who has been with me since the
| earliest Java days. He was so influential in Java thinking like
| Dependency Injection, loved 'Guice'. RIP.
|
| From his old blog:
|
| "I'm a stay-at-home dad. I used to be the CTO of Square. I also
| created the Jolt award-winning Guice framework and led the core
| library development for Android."
|
| I found some of my interactions with him in the comment section
| of his blog from nearly 20 years ago :'(
| dannyk129 wrote:
| Damn he was planning on selling cash app too.
| kumarm wrote:
| No 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.
| shenli3514 wrote:
| Shocked to hear about this. Rest In Peace Bob.
| irrational wrote:
| Why was he called crazybob?
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| [flagged]
| irrational wrote:
| [dead]
| MrDresden wrote:
| 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.
| aboodman wrote:
| I read that it originated from his waterpolo days.
| irrational wrote:
| That actually makes a lot of sense.
| sambapa wrote:
| [dead]
| dannyk129 wrote:
| [flagged]
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| We never met, but interacted in the haydays of Java. Bob Lee was
| one of the great ones everyone aspired to join one day. I
| remember his work on Dynaop, IoC and Guice. He felt like part of
| the underlying fabric of Java open source back then.
|
| Today I rediscovered some of my discussions on his old blog I had
| totally forgotten.
|
| Also looked through my mails, also totally forgotten:
| Re: Google Guice and Gabriel Bob Lee
| <crazybob@crazybob.org> Sat, Jun 16, 2007, 7:37 PM
| Done! On 6/16/07, Stephan Schmidt
| <stephan.schmidt@gmail.com> wrote: Hi Bob,
| got Gabriel working with Guice, moved from Dynaaop /
| Spring. Could you add Gabriel to
| http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/wiki/3rdPartyModules
| ? http://gabriel.reposita.org/ Thanks
| bye -stephan
|
| Always a supportive and friendly guy.
| ianroughley wrote:
| [flagged]
| eldritch_4ier wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| JamesMcMinn wrote:
| See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35457507 rather than
| accusing someone of being a sock puppet and doing EXACTLY what
| this post was created to avoid.
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| I was hugely inspired by his Java stuff too. Guice and I seem to
| recall then seeing his name on Guava and Android code too.
|
| Felt very guilty about 10 years ago when I won a competition (not
| sure how competitive it really was, but still) to meet him and
| Josh Bloch for pizza and Java talk. I think it was because they
| were attending a conference, but I wasn't able to get there.
| Still have the email from him, but never did get the chance to
| meet him. His career seemed to go from something that I could
| relate to, to stratospheric from there. Absolutely deservedly so
| from everything I could see.
|
| I've roamed around places that have a fairly sketchy reputation
| but being stabbed at that age seems unfathomable.
|
| Terrible loss, tragic for his family.
| helosBB3243 wrote:
| I was listening to the podcast about hidenburg / cash app stuff
| last night. Reading this news was sad.
| zht wrote:
| was at square for most of the 2010s.
|
| Bob really was a down to Earth guy.
|
| Easily the most approachable of the execs. I am very sad that
| Bob's life ended so suddenly.
| kelp wrote:
| A few things about Bob that I found remarkable.
|
| He was incredibly hard working, in the early days of Square he
| owned the engineering hiring process and was on the interview
| panel for _every_ engineer up through the company having hundreds
| of engineers. It was just an amazing amount of work he put into
| this. When there weren 't enough hours in the day, he started
| delegating, but the whole engineering culture was just incredibly
| shaped by his hard work.
|
| In spite of being very accomplished as an engineer, he was humble
| and knew what he didn't know. I worked in infrastructure and Bob
| was much more of a mobile guy. He deferred to our expertise in
| the areas where he wasn't an expert.
|
| Some years after we'd both left Square I was interviewing for at
| various companies. I noticed a shared connection at one company.
| I asked Bob for any background, and unprompted he sent a glowing
| recommendation to that company.
|
| And then CashApp. That started as a hack week project led by Bob.
| It was all email based, I remember how excited he and Jack were
| about it. It was cool, and IIRC, we actually launched the email
| only version of it before Square Cash and then CashApp evolved
| into what it is today.
| anon7725 wrote:
| Didn't know him, but saw his name all over Google's core Java
| libraries. Rest in peace.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| I met him a couple times at user group meetings for mobile dev.
| Always very patient and helpful. RIP.
| ceva wrote:
| Just wow how many stories, never met the guy but it seems like he
| was a unicorn person. Very sad that he died on such a tragic way
| and i hope they find the killer! Rip bob
| brunobowden wrote:
| Bob was always fun to be around. I was fortunate enough to
| collaborate with him on the @WHO Covid App. Bob masterfully build
| the backend in one impressive commit:
| https://github.com/WorldHealthOrganization/app/pull/127. You will
| be dearly missed, Bob.
| kayge wrote:
| His 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
| datalus wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| At this point, there's probably a whole generation on HN that
| isn't familiar with Digg, much less anything before.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| Finally a positive use for LinkedIn - a lot of Tributes to Bob
| over there:
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?fetchDeterminis...
| ianroughley wrote:
| Didn't know him well, but we've crossed paths over the years -
| from the early days of Guice and Struts2, and various conferences
| since. Always friendly and lots of great conversation. Such a
| tragedy.
| Lightbody wrote:
| 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.
| swframe2 wrote:
| I saw the news earlier and only just realized we worked together.
| He was an amazing person.
| robertwt7 wrote:
| This is so unfair, such a talented individual becomes another
| victim of our incompetent government. He has not only created
| excellent libraries and contributed so much to OSS but he is also
| excellent in creating new products. RIP Bob
| matttproud wrote:
| Bob 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 afterwards. The compassion and humility
| he brought to the table made a world of difference.
|
| His murder represents a huge loss; he left a very positive
| impression on me.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I've never met a dependency injection framework I liked, but I
| hated Guice least. Credit to the minds who conceived it.
| fnikacevic wrote:
| One of my old teams also liked to mispronounce it as "Gucci"
| for extra style
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Ah... I wondered where I recognized the `crazybob` name from.
|
| Guice was the one Google code that surprised me with how good
| it was while I was there.
| zinxq wrote:
| People loved Bob, it was truly just a magic he had.
|
| In 2010, Zuck gave a lot of money to NJ schools. For reasons
| completely unknown to me, Bob, who was at Square at the time, was
| given the task of writing the code to accept the donations. For
| reasons also completely unknown to me, Bob called me and asked me
| to help write the code. We had something like 3 days. I was
| working at my own startup at the time but was excited to go work
| on this one-off with Bob.
|
| We had worked together at Google and spent a lot of time in the
| Java community thereafter. We were both Java geeks at the time,
| but I was confused why he couldn't find anyone at Square.
|
| In any case - I went to Square each day for 3(?) days. I remember
| that we didn't need to process the transactions (thank goodness),
| but we just needed to validate and log them which made the
| problem much much easier. Bob insisted we write each transaction
| to 3 different machines for redundancy. He also insisted we used
| fsync which ensured the disk writes actually happened and didn't
| just get left in an output buffer. He was absolutely right, but I
| remember being saddened how much slower it made our system.
|
| We finished the system with time to spare. Unbeknownst to me (and
| maybe Bob I guess) another team at Square also implemented the
| system in Ruby in competition with us. I recall them being rather
| "anti-Java" at the time.
|
| In any case, we then benchmarked both systems and unsurprisingly,
| the Java version was many times faster than the Ruby version (in
| transactions stored per second). Of course, apart from fsync,
| this was also not just Java code - it was CrazyBob's Java code
| which wasted nothing. I really had a blast working on that
| project with him.
|
| I now realize I really don't know so many finer points of why
| many of these decisions were made. If any early Square folks were
| there for this, I'd be interested in what you remember.
| echelon wrote:
| I 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.
| josh2600 wrote:
| This is Joshua Goldbard, Founder of MobileCoin
|
| I had the distinct pleasure of working with Bob daily for the
| last few years. Bob was an incredible human being who I will miss
| every day. He was my friend and someone who drank deeply from the
| cup of life. He had a way of seeing the world that was
| enchanting. He was a visionary in so many ways.
|
| Bob led product for our team for years but that's probably the
| least interesting thing on his resume. He was the one of the
| early creators of Android, founding CTO at Square, and the
| inventor of CashApp. To be honest, none of his tech
| accomplishments compare to the person that he was.
|
| Everywhere Bob went he made friends. He did this by being a
| person who brought people together. He was loved far and wide
| because of his ability to build community.
|
| I will close with this: Bob joined MobileCoin because he believed
| in a future where we have protections from predatory corporations
| and criminals. He was always thinking about others. That is what
| I will remember about him. He wanted to protect and nurture the
| world.
|
| We are taking space to grieve now. Bob is survived by his family
| and friends who want privacy in this difficult time.
|
| https://get.moby.app/rememberingbob
| [deleted]
| digitalsanctum wrote:
| Shocked to hear about this senseless loss. I didn't know Bob
| personally but was a big inspiration to me as a Java developer
| early in my career. My thoughts and prayers to his family and
| friends.
| sjohnbs wrote:
| Hey 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
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=crazybob if you're curious
| about his HN presence.
| bubba_sparks wrote:
| Are there any events to honor Bob? I never knew the man but he
| was a part of my community. The SF tech community. I'd like to be
| a part of any sort of large public gathering to honor his life
| and work.
|
| We really need to organize people and do something. We all live
| in this city and we've all tolerated all this too long. To throw
| your hands up in the air and say it's "hopeless" doesn't help. At
| a certain point our collective apathy makes this situation our
| fault.
|
| Let's *hack* a solution! Let's disrupt this city! Let's solve
| this situation our way! Let Bob not have died in vain!
| burtonator wrote:
| This is senseless and a huge loss.
|
| Bob was a great guy.
|
| I met him briefly when he worked at Google. He was just starting
| to work on Guice and I was skeptical of dependency injection and
| we talked about it for an hour.
|
| I went home and did a heads down and Guice was a major impact on
| my coding for the next ten years.
|
| I bumped into "Crazy Bob"a few more times and just an insanely
| nice guy.
|
| He was also murdered at Main and Folsom right in downtown SOMA in
| SF. It was 2 blocks from my former apartment.
|
| SF is just almost not worth it at this point.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't cross into the flamewar stuff in this thread.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| ActorNightly wrote:
| Ive used Guice plenty back in Amazon days, honestly all the DI
| injection seems like a patch on top of fundamental problems
| with heavy OOP languages.
| snodnipper wrote:
| Bob was an incredible guy - we've lost wonderful tech leader
| _but_ I am so terribly sorry that his family have to go through
| this
| cnokleberg wrote:
| I first met Bob around 2005, working on Guice together. Later,
| when my startup was trying to get attention, he introduced me to
| the Google Docs team, which led to our acquisition. I'm still at
| Google 16+ years later, which very likely wouldn't have happened
| without Bob's involvement. He was always good about keeping in
| touch, even though he obviously had a huge number of friends and
| colleagues in his life. I'm sure many people have similar stories
| about how Bob's help or advice changed their lives for the
| better.
| iradik wrote:
| 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.
| ynx wrote:
| Precisely my experience with him as well.
| beastman82 wrote:
| 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.
| veeti wrote:
| 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.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Oh, yup. I knew him as "crazy bob" through all his guice
| comments, and didn't connect that these were the same Bob Lees
| until your comment.
| dannyr wrote:
| If I remember correctly, Bob Lee worked on the Google Android
| team too.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Some great contributions he did. RIP, life is simply unfair.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Shows how ephemeral our lives are - need to cherish each and
| every moment. RIP Bob.
| rediguanayum wrote:
| Oh no and so sad to see it now confirmed that crazybob passed.
| Didn't know Bob Lee personally, but his legacy lives on in the
| code that he wrote such as Guice injection, that I work with on a
| daily basis. He was truly a gifted programmer and pioneer.
| ZitchDog wrote:
| I am so sorry to hear this, my heart goes out to Bob's family. I
| had the pleasure of meeting Bob a few times while doing Android
| dev, he always went to Strange Loop. He was kind, smart, and
| funny. He was one of those CTOs that still loved to hack and
| tinker. The world will miss you, crazybob.
| kylecordes wrote:
| 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.
| aaa_aaa wrote:
| More than 15 years ago I was an avid follower of him on software
| development. He was an excellent developer and a good man. This
| is very very sad, condolences to his family.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| (We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35457428 by author's
| request)
| staticautomatic wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| 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/
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Yes. I offered because I would. I didn't ask anyone else to,
| I asked for myself.
| robk wrote:
| On the social side of things Bob was always good fun and I recall
| him playing games in our basement with us in like 2005. Here we
| are at A Google Halloween party 2005 or 2006
| https://flickr.com/photos/crazybob/286577267/in/set-72157594...
| glohbalrob wrote:
| Too bad. Rest in peace. Hope family is okay.
| msgilligan wrote:
| I remember having beers with Bob at the Tied House in Mountain
| View (maybe 10-15 years ago) after some conference or meetup
| (perhaps at Google.) A friendly, humble guy who was a great human
| being and great developer.
| bengalister wrote:
| I remember him from a tech video on theserverside.com, I thinkg
| it was on guice and dependency injection back in the 2005-2010
| period. He was all smiles, energetic and inspiring. Sad news.
| carrja99 wrote:
| I first discovered Bob via his blog, basically a post about how
| he had just joined Google. As a Java developer early in my
| career, he inspired me with his work on Google Collections, Guice
| and Android. He was a bit of a role model.
|
| Later when he moved back to St. Louis, I got to meet him
| personally a few times as he was friends with professional
| acquaintances. He was the most nice, down to earth person you'd
| meet. He will be sorely missed.
| geoffeg wrote:
| I first met him when he gave a talk at a St Louis Java user's
| group meeting on getting the first version of the Square app
| running on Android. The amount of optimization required at the
| time to get the app running in the limited resources was very
| interesting. I ran into him a few times around St. Louis after
| that and he was always happy to talk, so sincere and open to
| discussion no matter who you were.
| mbernstein wrote:
| I met Bob at StrangeLoop in (I think) 2014. He was there with
| Joshua Bloch and I entered a coding challenge and got to have
| dinner with them at a local pizza place. He was such an amazingly
| nice, gracious, intelligent, and giving person. He'll be
| immensely missed by the whole community.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| By "prototype hacker", do you mean "archetypal hacker"? Or did he
| something notable around hacking prototypes?
| dang wrote:
| The 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.
| pizlonator wrote:
| 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 heart of every GC I've written since, including
| the one that ships in JSC.
|
| Thanks for all the awesome insights bob.
| bgirard wrote:
| > 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.
| pizlonator wrote:
| 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...
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| I didn't know Bob personally but I ran into his work all the time
| online. Even from afar, there was something special and
| inspirational about crazybob! Didn't expect to wake up to this
| news today. My sincerest condolences to his family.
| elbenshira wrote:
| For some reason I was thinking about Bob two days ago, ten years
| since I last interacted with him. I was just an intern at Square
| and he had just joined as CTO. But I remember how patient and
| inquisitive he was with me. Rest in peace, Bob.
| spullara wrote:
| 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 CashApp and created a strong
| engineering culture. Even though he was a college dropout he was
| one of the best algorithm guys I have met (e.g.
| https://www.beust.com/weblog/coding-challenge-wrap-up/). The
| closest we ever got to working together was when I was talking
| with Twitter about an acquisition of my startup and was getting
| advice from him he immediately put us into the process at Square.
| I think their pair programming interview style was the most fun I
| have had interviewing. We ultimately went with Twitter but I
| would have done as well going with Square.
|
| Our families would hang out together when we lived close and I
| feel sick just thinking about his children right now.
| mavelikara wrote:
| I was trying to find that blog post by Cedric. Thanks Sam for
| linking it.
|
| Bob Lee, RIP.
| pchristensen wrote:
| I didn't know Bob other than one session with him when I
| interviewed at Square. I wasn't offered the job and don't
| remember anything else from that interview, but Bob stuck out as
| a very bright and very personable, compassionate, excited, and
| welcoming person. I never heard from him after that interview,
| but I wish I had met and worked with more people like him in the
| decade since.
| timcobb wrote:
| wow Rest In Peace Bob. You were an inspiration.
| foobazgt wrote:
| Bob was "good people", always advocating for others, yet also
| demanding in expectations. I also knew Bob as an engineer's
| engineer - able to dive deep down into murky system details (ala
| The Night Watch -
| https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf) while
| simultaneously advocating for usability in API design. Bob was
| also the first person I heard the axiom "Code drunk, deploy
| sober" from. If you know Bob, you know.
|
| I first met Bob when I joined Google and Josh Bloch introduced me
| to folks working on Guice: Bob Lee, Jesse Wilson, and others. I
| didn't work directly with Bob, but we talked here and there. I
| learned he had strong opinions - at one point he tried to
| convince me to use Dalvik (Android's Java Runtime) for App
| Engine. I was not convinced. A decision I still stand by today.
| :)
|
| A bit later Bob left Google to join Square and become CTO, and a
| bit after that I left Google to start Square's ATL office [1]. I
| still remember having run the technical interview gauntlet,
| meeting Bob for a final interview, and him wanting to grill me
| with a circular queue implementation. [2] Bob and I talked about
| my work history, and it jogged his memory. In an interview
| training class that Bob and I later gave together, he recalled
| being embarrassed about the experience and exhorted everyone to
| make sure they fully read the candidate's resume before the
| interview.
|
| Bob was always hands on. You respected his opinions and advice
| even if you didn't always agree. It's a technical depth that's
| hard to maintain as you get higher up in management, and I got
| the impression that it's one of the reasons why he eventually
| moved on from Square as it was growing from hundreds of employees
| to thousands.
|
| I like to think of Bob as a kindred spirit. We both grew up in
| Cobb County, both striving to be world-class engineers. He made
| the world seem smaller, even if it took a Google re-org, some
| serendipity, and repeated travel 3,000mi west to get to know each
| other. RIP Crazy Bob from Cobb.
|
| 1) Along with six other Xooglers
|
| 2) I refused - I was burnt out from all the previous interviews
| at that point.
| hintymad wrote:
| 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.
| bootsygw wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20080912181335/crazybob.org/Beus...
| hintymad wrote:
| 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
| bdwedding wrote:
| Here's the one you were thinking of. This was the one
| "further optimized", not the first one posted:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20090723015302/http://crazybob.
| o...
| hintymad wrote:
| Ah, yes. Thanks!
| somekyle wrote:
| Hah! I was just remembering the exact same thing. His
| fingerprints are all over my development as a professional Java
| programmer.
| scythe wrote:
| I was curious about this, but it looks like the links to
| crazybob.org now 404.
|
| It seems to me like the trick would be to find a way to
| generate, in order, the numbers you _can 't_ print, then you
| just print the gaps between them.
| bdwedding wrote:
| I ported his code to C++, the linked list version and the other
| recursive version. Then I removed the recursion. For me, the
| linked list is 2X slower and the non-recursive version using a
| stack is slightly faster than his original version.
|
| https://gist.github.com/bwedding/19c1bd0e967cfb62084fabdd6bf...
| glaforge wrote:
| 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), Cedric 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.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| What a thread with all those people from the mid-2000s.
| julienchastang wrote:
| I am sad to read this, this AM. I _remember_ Bob Lee from when he
| was a Java evangelist / technologist / blogger / author. I
| believe he was from the Midwest (St. Louis?). He co-authored
| "Bitter EJB", I believe. Terrible loss.
| briantakita wrote:
| RIP Bob...It would be great to have a memorial site of his life &
| contributions.
| bcantrill wrote:
| 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 me: for the best
| read, you want constant acceleration of your card -- not a fast
| swipe.) He showed me the tooling that he had built at Square to
| debug bad swipes; it was a role model for rigor in engineering
| and especially for the power of tooling. (Unsurprisingly, I was
| not the only person that had a conversation around this time and
| about this topic with Bob.[0])
|
| dang: Thank you for the black bar today for Bob, a role model for
| us all who will be deeply missed.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1643599340106301440
| xvedejas wrote:
| Constant acceleration, or did you mean velocity? I'm imagining
| that the magstripe data must be unevenly spaced for constant
| acceleration to make sense?
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