6 ms·

It’s amazing how this is the first time I have heard his name. Great people basically disappear under the Google name.

by xyst 7y ago

ohwel2l 7y ago
Well, I disagree. His presence has been huge in social media and in a variety of Go-specific communities. Google has had a great impact in that because it was basically sponsoring the whole thing.
bradfitz 7y ago
Brad here. I wrote about this when I first joined Google, having noticed the same prior to joining: https://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html https://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html That was my big fear of joining Google, being sucked into the black hole. (Ignore the later part of the post about the App Engine app that I couldn't keep running because App Engine kept breaking me all the time.)
- the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
  I'm really curious though where you end up now :)
- zellyn 7y ago
  I mean, that Smoke Detector thing was pretty notable… although to be fair, I was inside Google at the time :-)
- jimbokun 7y ago
  Interesting reading this now, the part about making open source contributions easier makes a pretty good pitch for Github.
kick 7y ago
Google manages to turn even the most brilliant men and women into purse dogs. It's kind of their thing. There have been almost two decades of blog posts on this exact phenomenon, and I never get bored of reading them.
nostrademons 7y ago
It's interesting how fleeting software fame is. Perhaps that's just a special case of how fleeting fame is. Folks who came of age in the early 2000s certainly remember him - he founded LiveJournal; wrote memcached, MogileFS, Gearman, and a bunch of other prominent software packages; authored the first version of the OpenID spec (which eventually became OAuth, which you see all over the web); and was one of the early Go engineers. He's featured in Coders at Work. Same with other tech luminaries from that time period: Jamie Zawinski (xemacs, Netscape), Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek, StackOverflow, Trello), Paul Buchheit (GMail, Friendfeed), Kent Beck (Extreme Programming), Ward Cunningham (XP, WikiWikiWeb), et al. Don't hear about them much these days, and when one of Kent Beck's more recent posts was featured on Hacker News people were like "Who is this guy?"
- Gigablah 7y ago
  I’ve been running a website for over 10 years and have, at various points, made use of all those packages (mogileFS, memcache, gearman). Brad’s influence is enormous. Thank you, Brad.
- the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
  > Don't hear about them much these days I hear about Brad every single day because I follow him on Twitter. It's just a question about where you consume your information from.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    I think it's more that the volume of information has massively expanded since. In the days before MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, LiveJournal was the social network (along with blogs and personal websites), so naturally its founder and people who were active on it had higher profiles.
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  That's true; some of those folks just left the software industry, though, I think, or are at or approaching retirement age. Tangentially, it's still interesting -- and faintly depressing -- to me how much I think LiveJournal got right about social media that its bigger successors, well, don't, specifically related to privacy. LJ users had comparatively immense control over who could read and reply to posts. This isn't to say that Twitter and Facebook don't get a lot of things right, too, in terms of ease of posting, lack of friction, and (for both better and worse) monetization, but I wish "granularity of acces control" had been a lesson we'd carried forward. In any case, I'll be curious to see where Brad ends up next.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rainyMammoth 7y ago
Great individuals should really reconsider joining Google. I saw this so many times, you get lured by the money and the big name and after a couple years what you do is associated with Google only. I'm wondering if they will be able to sustain this now that the Google brand-name is not specifically being seen as a good thing anymore.
yawaramin 7y ago
He came into my consciousness after I read Coders at Work. Fascinating book.

It’s amazing how this is the first time I have heard his name. Great people basically disappear under the Google name.

by xyst 7y ago

It’s amazing how this is the first time I have heard his name. Great people basically disappear under the Google name.

Well, I disagree. His presence has been huge in social media and in a variety of Go-specific communities. Google has had a great impact in that because it was basically sponsoring the whole thing.

bradfitz 7y ago

Brad here. I wrote about this when I first joined Google, having noticed the same prior to joining: https://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html https://brad.livejournal.com/2409049.html That was my big fear of joining Google, being sucked into the black hole. (Ignore the later part of the post about the App Engine app that I couldn't keep running because App Engine kept breaking me all the time.)

the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
I'm really curious though where you end up now :)
zellyn 7y ago
I mean, that Smoke Detector thing was pretty notable… although to be fair, I was inside Google at the time :-)
jimbokun 7y ago
Interesting reading this now, the part about making open source contributions easier makes a pretty good pitch for Github.

kick 7y ago

Google manages to turn even the most brilliant men and women into purse dogs. It's kind of their thing. There have been almost two decades of blog posts on this exact phenomenon, and I never get bored of reading them.

nostrademons 7y ago

It's interesting how fleeting software fame is. Perhaps that's just a special case of how fleeting fame is. Folks who came of age in the early 2000s certainly remember him - he founded LiveJournal; wrote memcached, MogileFS, Gearman, and a bunch of other prominent software packages; authored the first version of the OpenID spec (which eventually became OAuth, which you see all over the web); and was one of the early Go engineers. He's featured in Coders at Work. Same with other tech luminaries from that time period: Jamie Zawinski (xemacs, Netscape), Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek, StackOverflow, Trello), Paul Buchheit (GMail, Friendfeed), Kent Beck (Extreme Programming), Ward Cunningham (XP, WikiWikiWeb), et al. Don't hear about them much these days, and when one of Kent Beck's more recent posts was featured on Hacker News people were like "Who is this guy?"

Gigablah 7y ago
I’ve been running a website for over 10 years and have, at various points, made use of all those packages (mogileFS, memcache, gearman). Brad’s influence is enormous. Thank you, Brad.
the_mitsuhiko 7y ago
> Don't hear about them much these days I hear about Brad every single day because I follow him on Twitter. It's just a question about where you consume your information from.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  I think it's more that the volume of information has massively expanded since. In the days before MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, LiveJournal was the social network (along with blogs and personal websites), so naturally its founder and people who were active on it had higher profiles.
chipotle_coyote 7y ago
That's true; some of those folks just left the software industry, though, I think, or are at or approaching retirement age. Tangentially, it's still interesting -- and faintly depressing -- to me how much I think LiveJournal got right about social media that its bigger successors, well, don't, specifically related to privacy. LJ users had comparatively immense control over who could read and reply to posts. This isn't to say that Twitter and Facebook don't get a lot of things right, too, in terms of ease of posting, lack of friction, and (for both better and worse) monetization, but I wish "granularity of acces control" had been a lesson we'd carried forward. In any case, I'll be curious to see where Brad ends up next.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rainyMammoth 7y ago

Great individuals should really reconsider joining Google. I saw this so many times, you get lured by the money and the big name and after a couple years what you do is associated with Google only. I'm wondering if they will be able to sustain this now that the Google brand-name is not specifically being seen as a good thing anymore.

yawaramin 7y ago

He came into my consciousness after I read Coders at Work. Fascinating book.