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.
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.
I didn't know him when he joined my AdWords team in '04. He was the next to join after me. He was 24 (I was 29) and he was known by a fun nickname and he had already co-written a BOOK ferchrissakes.
Worse, he was going to be working on the stuff that I had asked to work on (but had been told we didn't have time for).
I had him sized up all right. I didn't like hotshot kids like that.
Then he pops into my cube one day and asks if I could help him get IntelliJ working.
This immediately surprised me. Hotshots don't ask random nobodies for help! In our field I guess it's the purest sign of humility and respect we have.
My times of not liking Bob Lee were over by about 12 seconds into that conversation.
Once we got it working, I casually mentioned something about the work he was assigned to do -- that I was so jealous about -- and I will never forget what he did. He said "yeah, so I was thinking we might do something like..." and just like that we were COLLABORATING.
That is who Bob was.
And we kept collaborating. He started fixing our dependency hairball issues using injection, and my friend Z and I eagerly adopted what he was building in a second subproject. Soon Bob and I were having interesting design discussions almost every day, figuring out how to turn his brilliant ideas into an open-source product. That became Guice.
When designing a new thing Bob was like a kid at Christmas. I have emails from him sent at odd hours with subjects like "we can solve <X> like <Y>!!" and no body. Classic Bob.
Bob was genuine, kind, and fully possessed of the joy of making things. And he was unlike any other tech person I've met.
His tech accomplishments go on for miles, but I am positive that the list of people like me whose lives he changed for the better is longer.
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.
CashApp's monolith is still called Franklin today.
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.
Bob Lee will be missed.
I suspect many CTOs long for this kind of work. But their time is usually taken up with administrative duties.
Most of the times the leadership is clueless about the problems in their orgs because nobody wants to tell them any real problem.
They appreciate that you share your pain points with them even without solutions.
Of course, you should share the pain points in a polite manner where you talk about your perspective only without speculation on other people's intents. But you should do that any way regardless of who the listener is.
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.
His murder represents a huge loss; he left a very positive impression on me.
Guice was the one Google code that surprised me with how good it was while I was there.
dang: Thank you for the black bar today for Bob, a role model for us all who will be deeply missed.
I want to second that.
Our families would hang out together when we lived close and I feel sick just thinking about his children right now.
Bob Lee, RIP.
1) when I was CTO of the Obama Campaign I was scared and lost. bob helped me so much. helped me be a better CTO. helped me sell a lot of weird shit to people who didn't want to buy (i.e. tech). and helped us use square. it was always so much fun. He was a very strong guiding force.
Once, when he came to chicago to help with the square integration for OFA, we all went out clubbing and it go so crazy. (I think) he lost his laptop. randy reddig and him both lost a bunch of their stuff. I remember he stayed out all night partying with people who he didn't know. I still have DJ friends who mention "whatever happened to that square guy who was so much fun. "
towards the end of the campaign he schooled me on how to run a better interview program. helped me design the interview strategy we had at modest (which I am really proud of). he reminded me that you can be ethical, gracious and flexible - and still hire great people. no need to be a dick. be positive
2) my friend Derek broox and I went clubbing in the early 2000s. we went to a metallica show with vivid entertainment (wild times) and Derek took this photo of the metallica show. for some reason we uploaded the photos to my flickr account. metallica found the photo and used it in their death magnetic album cover. they credited me and not Derek. (More details here - https://derek.broox.com/blog/do-i-sue-metallica-or-do-i-sue-...)
anyway. Years and years pass and Metallica is like "whoops" and invites both of us to see Metallica at this super small venue in Iowa. I told bob about it and he introduced me to Lars. Lol. Of course bob knows Lars and is just going to introduce me.
3) last week bob calls me at 7am chicago time. I am in bed. he calls me on FaceTime like a mad person. no heads up. just facetimes me. lol.
He was hanging out with Lee Foss and wanted to make sure we connected (lee is from chicago and we have a lot of mutuals). Bob was like "you guys are both awesome!"
4)
One time in the 2010s we were going to some benefit party at a club in SF. We show up and the door guy told us that it was going to be 25 bucks to get it. Or 5 bucks but we had to ditch our clothes and be in our underwear. Bob and I immediately choose the 5 dollars option without saying anything. Just immediately took off our pants. It just made sense. It was a great party and really fun.
---
Bob was a tremendous mentor to me. He helped me when I was a baby cto (at the Obama campaign lol) and helped me when I was a baby ceo. He was one of the bright stars out there who helped make sure the world was better. I am pretty cynical about technology and our industry - bob was an exception. Without bob, I wouldn't be who I am today. The best part is that I know dozens of people who would say the same thing. His impact is wide and weird.
I wouldn't say I know his values, but I watched his actions: - he was always generous with his time, and his connections - he was always up for an adventure - and even when we had no pants on in a club, he was giving me advice on how to make sure my company was more successful, make sure my teams were properly fed, and make sure I was taking care of myself
I am going to miss that guy
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.
Like you, and hundreds of other Square engineers, I was asked to implement a circular buffer in my interview with him. I did it, not having the fortitude to decline, and I’m glad I did. I learned a thing or two, including that I would learn a hundred more things if I joined Square. What a great way to sell candidates.
I remember Bob kicking off the effort to get every Square engineer to come up with a pairing question and carry that culture forward when it no longer scaled for him and a handful of others to do it. I don’t think people thought it was reasonable. I do believe it worked!
I remember new folks asking earnest questions about why we had a monorepo and Bob replying that it was self-evident (a rare miss). But when I called him out on that he took the time to explain to me how it was all about being able to do global refactors across all our apps… something that only made sense when you were the kind of seasoned Java programmer who really wanted to refactor shared libraries on behalf of all teams at once. So glad he attracted more of you ;)
I remember working with Bob to update some of the Square visualizations that Mike Bostock of d3 fame had created. The “can do” attitude prevailed, even though Mike’s code was not documented, we were able to get it working and I believe we did truly novel work that day. Pretty sure (thanks Hindenburg) that code is still running.
I remember a lot of hiring bars, where not only was Bob responsible for scaling up the pair programming interviews, but he was actually really interested in the code people wrote, and in reviewing it with his colleagues. I later saw some flaws with that, but I’ve always respected the passion and the attention to detail.
As Cash scaled, before he left Square, I remember Bob went back into IC mode and was there, late nights and all, headphones on, cranking out the code. Pretty sure it was Minus the Bear on repeat for hours.
Last memory, I remember a surprising number of hugs and enthusiastic handshakes when things went well. Candidates closed. Features shipped. Fridays.
Just the raw exuberance. That’s why this hits so hard. RIP crazybob.
RIP :(
He was probably looking for a distributed way to label logs and build an ingestion service that shards regionally with high availability, but still able to search and filter within an acceptable time for debugging purposes.
In the early 2000s, I first encountered Bob through the Java open source community. He had a knack of being able to go deep on a tough problem and emerge with a wonderfully elegant solution. This was a time when software was getting increasingly complex, and so did the knowledge required to understand it, yet Bob consistently bucked the trend and made things seems simple. He would tackle problems that scared others. He was crazy. Crazy Bob.
At one point we had a rivalry working on two open source projects competing to solve the same problem. When we first met face to face, I was nervous there may be confrontation, yet he was friendly, full of energy, and excited that we shared the passion for the same problem. We brainstormed many ideas and both went away feeling great! His crazy energy amplified my own and passion for software.
Shortly after, I joined Google because of Bob. Over the years since, he and I did our best to recruit each other for nearly every company either of us worked at - we just never got the timing right, yet I was always hopeful we'd figure it out eventually.
Even in CxO roles, whenever Bob and I met we'd geek out on all sorts of tech problems, ranging from API design, to embedded C firmware tricks, to financial protocols, to graph network theory, to hardware development. He loved tech, and his eyes lit up whenever we found a shared passion.
Bob was one of those few people who was incredibly smart, could see the problem in different ways, energize everyone around them, and make you want to be a better you.
Crazy Bob. You'll be missed.
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.
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.
Bob worked on the original Google Adwords. He created Guice. He worked on the original Android. He worked at Square. Cash app. etc. His technical chops were solid, and he actually loved doing the technical work. In his spare time, he programmed his custom garage door openers and did all sorts of other crazy projects.
But what he was best at was being an amazing cheerleader. Sure, he loved to talk about his passion projects and whatever library he had whipped up in a 48-hour coding session the week before, but he actually put more effort into bragging about the stuff other people were accomplishing around him. And he wasn't faking it -- he really loved it all, and he really meant it. He spent hours and hours bragging to me about people he was lucky enough to work with, and I've met many of them, and they're all like "he's got that all backwards". Some of them I haven't met, but I swear I know them inside and out just from all of his descriptions. :D
He was also super proud of his little brother Timmy ("Oliver"), who moved out to SF running some high end restaurants, and ended up switching into the tech industry as well.
And of course Bob was most proud of his two daughters.
I last talked with him in February, and at least I got to tell him one last time that I loved him and his family. And while I'd normally (and respectfully) say RIP, I swear there's no "Rest In Peace" for Crazy Bob ... wherever he is, the music is turned up to 11 and the lights are on all night.
YES, that is peak crazybob right there. Thanks, this was beautiful.
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.
Can you share more details? That's so counter intuitive to how I think of WeakMaps and I would like to know more.
However, if memory serves, the JS weak map has the semantics bob wanted: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
So many of you have shared about how he impacted Java, Open Source, and being an engineer. I figured I could recount a couple more personal anecdotes.
1) I tried to keep up with Bob drink for drink one night... big mistake. We were at Strange Loop in St. Louis together (I believe 2013). On the Saturday, a bunch of us went out for drinks at a nearby dive bar. He was the life of the party as usual. I stopped at least 1 hr and 5 drinks shy of Bob. The next morning I woke up with the 3rd worst hangover I had ever had and he looked fresh as could be.
2) A bunch of Squares went to The Cafe (a Gay bar in the Castro) one night. He and his wife had put the girls to bed and called a sitter so they could come out with us. I vividly remember at one point in the night, we were hanging out by the bar area and I mentioned I was going to go down on the dance floor for a bit. "Down there?" he asks as he grabs me by the shoulder with a mild look a fear on his face. It was a pretty busy night. A gogo dancer stood over us, hips to eye level, on the covered pool table. "You don't want to go down theeeere!" implicit in his tone was a sense of worry that I'd be a piece of meat in the sea of people. His wife looked at me, shrugged, and we laughed
Bob and I overlapped at Google and on Android and I think we even shared a manager for some time. It seems we overlapped at at least one Foo Camp as well.
Bob always seemed chipper, excited, friendly, patient, and happy.
I've been searching my email to re-read our various interactions over the years. We started following each other on Twitter in 2008. In 2012, a friend offered to put me on the guest list for a Stripe party. I replied that "Crazybob already put me on :-)". In 2020 we were DMing about custom-designed front doors and whether my friend also wanted to make him one. He was thinking Shou Sugi Ban style.
We're the same age, both dads. I also used to live in SF and visit sometimes. It all seems so surreal.
I hadn't seen him in person in ages but regularly saw him post to Twitter.
Like I said, nothing much unique to say. But I'll miss him. He was good people.
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.
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.
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 that would be given from the public alongside Zuck's gift. 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.
Bob called me after Zuck's announcement that the system hit a peak of (wait for it), 5 transactions per second. And that for only a very short time. The system was mostly only loaded with a transaction every few seconds (or maybe even minutes)
The Ruby version would have been fine. Heck, we probably could have just printed the transactions to some screen and have someone write them down at that speed.
We did have a good laugh though.
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.
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.
We first met 20 years ago, in 2003. It was the same evening I met Cameron Purdy and Juergen Hoeller, at the first ServerSide Symposium, in Boston. Bob must have been 23. He looked like a kid, although he’d already achieved a lot. Actually, he always looked young. If I remember correctly he had driven to Boston from STL.
We hung out at that conference with a bunch of folk who did a lot of important stuff over the next few years. It was an amazing time in the Java community. Bob was so enthusiastic and positive and full of ideas.
Bob and I first collaborated on something called the AOP Alliance, with Jon Tirsen, back in 2003. Interceptor based AOP-lite for Java. We wanted Spring and Jon and Bob’s projects to be interoperable. Tiny little API but better for Bob’s input. And useful.
Later on, we collaborated on standardising injection, including Bob’s great ideas from Guice. Since 2007, Spring has been better because of Bob. Even when you had a different opinion, it was always enjoyable and rewarding to discuss tech with Bob.
But more important, I have so many good memories of Bob as a person. We spent a lot of time together when I first moved to the Bay Area in the late 2000s and it was a ton of fun. Bob knew I’d just moved from London and was very welcoming. Lunches at Google, concerts at Mountain View Amphitheater, bar crawls in SF (Bob always knew another place and had infinite energy), hanging out at his house in Mountain View, where I saw him be a great dad.
Bob was a key presence at the infamous destruction party in 2011 after I’d bought my SF apartment and planned to gut it, and people were kicking holes in walls, writing on mirrors in lipstick and rolling in the blinds they’d pulled down. Memories are hazy but I seem to remember Bob practicing karate kicks on a door someone had taken off, and his brother trying to open a wine bottle with a shoe. So sad to think that Andy Gross from Basho was there also. Another brilliant, interesting one who’s also sadly gone.
It’s a measure of the positive impact that Bob had that so many people from way back have reconnected over this tragedy. I guess we all need to talk about our shock, and remind each other of how great those times with Bob were.
RIP Bob. You were a great guy, and a brilliant mind. I feel for your family and many friends and am sad we’ll never get to hang out again.
I’ll miss him forever.
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.
Then I wrote a book about Guice. As I remember it Apress contacted him to do it. It wasn’t something he was able to take on, so he suggested Dhanji, who later joined him at Google and also Square. Dhanji wrote some of the first extension libraries for Guice with Warp Persist, and later worked on the official web extensions. It turned out Dhanji was already writing another book for Manning and he didn’t want to do both. So he sent them to me, and I’m an author now. Because Bob inspired me to pay it forward.
In my mind it was be fitting for Bob to write the foreword for my book. At the following Javapolis conference in Belgium he was a speaker, which I figured was the perfect opportunity to ask. He got mobbed after his talk but later I found him sitting at a table (next to Josh Bloch). So I went up to him and introduced myself. His eyes lit up and he was so excited to finally meet me. Of course the excitement was all mine. I asked him if he would write the foreword for the book I was writing. He didn’t seem to think about it and immediately agreed. We then talked a bit about the conference and I left him be as I didn’t want to be a bother.
I sent him a draft copy of the book and a couple of weeks later he came through and sent me the foreword he had written. It was perfect, the first version went straight in the book.
We’ve had a few other interactions over the years. I would’ve loved to work with him but it was never the right time for me to move to the US.
Bob inspired me to be a better version of me and I’ll never forget that. I’m still in shock by this news. And being a father myself now, it hits extra hard. Sending all the love to his family and may he 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 :'(
https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?fetchDeterminis...
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!
https://gist.github.com/bwedding/19c1bd0e967cfb62084fabdd6bf...
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.
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.
Just curious what was he like in terms of the craziness? Partying? Skydiving?
"Obie is one of those Ruby developers with no programming experience"
http://blog.crazybob.org/2007/09/gavin-king-on-activerecord....
We would debate all things Java, at a time where that was the place to pioneer in a lot of ways. For real.
When I met him in person I was confused. He looked too cool for school. He carried himself in a certain way. He wouldn’t want to talk to me…
But no. He was an ultimate geek too. I saw him in many situations where he fit in there too. It always felt different.
And then there was the Vegas trip. We put on TheServerSide Symposium, and in one of the most surreal days ever, I ended up on the bridge of the Enterprise, celebrating Bob getting married.
Never a dull moment with Bob. An intense creative mind, and one that loooooved to have some fun.
I just went through some old emails, many of which had a common pattern in the thread of:
“AWESOME!!!”
What a guy.
So sorry I missed the wedding. I think I was speaking or doing a client call at the time.
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.
That curiosity and enthusiasm spilled over into anything he did, including supporting his friends in their endeavors. He'd be the first to cheer you on and brag about you or what you were doing to other friends, almost to the point of embarrassment where he believed in you or your project more than you did, LOL.
It was like being around the sun and constant solar flares of positivity, almost like my golden retriever LOL... He was unlike anyone else I'd experienced in my 22 years in tech in SF. We had bonded over both being midwest boys and there was an unspoken bond between us that endured no matter how long it'd been since we last spoke. We knew and acknowledged that each of us was an oasis for one another from the funhouse mirror that is bay area technology. We could each exhale and be ourselves with no posturing. And if anyone had any reason to posture at all it was Bob. Everything he did was a winner and all that success never once went to his head.
So while Bob was a great engineer/technologist, he was a greater man who truly lived life by the golden rule and would've been successful in anything he chose to do. It still hasn't fully hit me that he's gone, and I can't imagine what Krista and the girls are going through right now along with the rest of Bob's family.
My heart goes out to all of them and anyone else that knew him well. Thank you Bob. Thank you for believing in me always and for being a great friend. The world needs you and more people like you. RIP... until we meet again buddy...
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.
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
One thing I loved about Bob, is regardless of what he built, who he knew or worked with, you would never see him lean on that to express who he was..
Bob was just a real person with a passion for programming and helping people.
Looking back on my time knowing Bob, I do regret not taking him up on his offer to work with him. I could only imagine how I would have grown as a person by working closely with him.
I do want to say, Bob clearly had a consistency in his style of clothing. It didn't changed over the years.. lol
It all still seems unreal.
It was the most fun I had that day, and I still use it as a gauge of how to interview folk (though I don't use that question).
Such a tragic loss for the programmer community and of course... his family. Deepest condolences.
When I eventually took over maintenance of Guice, I was pleasantly surprised at how Bob was gracious with someone else "owning" his creation.
I occasionally chatted with him over the years, and he was always just such a kind and wonderful person.
I will greatly miss him, and especially miss the lost opportunity to really get to know him.
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.
Bob was the first person I looked up to as an open source engineer early in my career. I studied his code closely, and learned a lot from the way he was able to distill complex problems into beautifully crafted APIs. Those learnings, along with some of his principles of software design, shaped my own work, including in open source, to this day. When Bob went on to great success I was not surprised in the least. He was a great engineer and deserved to still be with us.
If that ever happens, D&S, I hoped I could say something to you. If you never see it, well, I tried.
It's like this. You're going to be bombarded your entire lives by people going on and on about what an incredible person your dad was. You will never get away from it. I know, because my mom was also one of those absolutely rare one-in-a-billion souls. And for 40 years I've been hearing the legend of Sharon.
But for some reason, no one ever once said to me: "you know what Kev? Please tell us what she was like. Who she was to us, that's just who she was to us. You knew sides of her that we never could, and who she was to you is so very very important too."
Never. Once.
I'm not asking you to answer that to me or anything. But I just wanted to say. Yes, please enjoy reading and hearing our memories of him. I think they will bring a smile to your face from time to time. But there is a bigger part of him that belongs to you and you alone. And that matters so, so much. Hold it close and never stop talking about him. Even if just to each other. Even if just to yourselves.
I'm so very sorry he was taken from you.
(Hey, I got through that without even an I-remember-you-when-you-were-this-big!) (butIdo)
He was kind, took his time to explain things in way that the day to day developer could understand.
I’ll miss you crazy Bob, heart goes out to your family.
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.
Whenever we met up, Bob would drag me kick and screaming out of my comfort zone. Somehow, everything I did with Bob always seemed like a bad idea but always turned out to be memorable and wickedly fun. He was so enthusiastic for life, and his enthusiasm was infectious.
I remember talking to him when he got the Square CTO offer, and him giggling about how uniquely unqualified he felt but hey why not, he's crazybob so no matter what happens he'll have fun. He took me on a tour of the NYC office, and was bemused by how silly it was that he was supposed to be the adult in the room.
Somehow amidst all the fun, we still managed to find time to discuss all things Java, from the politics of the JCP to why Guice refused to support @PostConstruct to the clever hackery he figured out to get Guice to have useful error messages when bindings failed.
I'll miss you Bob, you were a bright beacon of joy that inspired everyone around you.
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.
What a devastating, senseless tragedy.
(This was actually the late 00s though!)
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...
Does not answer where it originally came from, but he seems to have enjoyed the nickname.
I have used Guice and then Dagger in projects. I admired the simplicity and his thought process which might have gone through to create these amazing projects.
Bob you'll be missed.
Does anyone know where the moniker 'crazybob' originated from?
What a great guy. Can’t say enough good things about him.
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?