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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

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.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  When Google+ was under development in 2011, I remarked to my team "So, our differentiator from Facebook is...basically everything that LiveJournal had in 2002?"
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    Heh. While I never really got into Google+, its "circles" idea definitely reminded me of LJ -- and it seemed like a great idea. It seems like it might not have been communicated very well to the audience.
  - solarkraft 7y ago
    Circles were great! Google+ was among the least obnoxious social media platforms I have experienced. I think it could really have replaced all the fragmented around Google comment forms, but it sure wasn't wise to force everyone on YouTube on it in such a shitty way. I think that initial public outcry was a significant stop to its velocity, yet it could have become moderately successful and very valuable long-term to slowly integrate all of Google's services. Just so many parts of the execution were questionable, including the mobile apps :\ Was the lack of a semi-immediate huge return the reason it was killed?
- sundarurfriend 7y ago
  At least one part of it is the faith that users can be smart people, rather than the current approach to customization UX which seems to be "take it all away from the fools".
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    I think part of that comes from the (reasonable) assumption that the simpler you make your UX, the less friction there is for people using your service. But it would be nice to see someone work on bringing more granularity and flexibility back to social media, even at the cost of a little more friction. (I also suspect some of it comes from people looking at Apple's historic "make simple things simple" approach to UX and taking the wrong lessons from it, which arguably includes latter-day Apple, but that's a whole different post...)
thrower123 7y ago
You will not hear about Zawinski much here, because his blog has an... interesting... redirect when it sees a ycombinator referrer url.
corford 7y ago
Justin Frankel is another name that could go on that list.
hi41 7y ago
There was one more person I remember. Jim Kent. He worked on the human genome project. President Bill Clinton compared that to man landing on the moon.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
JabavuAdams 7y ago
I know all of those names, except Brad Fitz. This is like a WTF moment for me. Like first hearing about Gaiman's Sandman 15 years after it came out and thinking it would have been right up my alley 15 years ago.

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.

nostrademons 7y ago
When Google+ was under development in 2011, I remarked to my team "So, our differentiator from Facebook is...basically everything that LiveJournal had in 2002?"
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  Heh. While I never really got into Google+, its "circles" idea definitely reminded me of LJ -- and it seemed like a great idea. It seems like it might not have been communicated very well to the audience.
- solarkraft 7y ago
  Circles were great! Google+ was among the least obnoxious social media platforms I have experienced. I think it could really have replaced all the fragmented around Google comment forms, but it sure wasn't wise to force everyone on YouTube on it in such a shitty way. I think that initial public outcry was a significant stop to its velocity, yet it could have become moderately successful and very valuable long-term to slowly integrate all of Google's services. Just so many parts of the execution were questionable, including the mobile apps :\ Was the lack of a semi-immediate huge return the reason it was killed?
sundarurfriend 7y ago
At least one part of it is the faith that users can be smart people, rather than the current approach to customization UX which seems to be "take it all away from the fools".
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  I think part of that comes from the (reasonable) assumption that the simpler you make your UX, the less friction there is for people using your service. But it would be nice to see someone work on bringing more granularity and flexibility back to social media, even at the cost of a little more friction. (I also suspect some of it comes from people looking at Apple's historic "make simple things simple" approach to UX and taking the wrong lessons from it, which arguably includes latter-day Apple, but that's a whole different post...)

thrower123 7y ago

You will not hear about Zawinski much here, because his blog has an... interesting... redirect when it sees a ycombinator referrer url.

corford 7y ago

Justin Frankel is another name that could go on that list.

hi41 7y ago

There was one more person I remember. Jim Kent. He worked on the human genome project. President Bill Clinton compared that to man landing on the moon.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

JabavuAdams 7y ago

I know all of those names, except Brad Fitz. This is like a WTF moment for me. Like first hearing about Gaiman's Sandman 15 years after it came out and thinking it would have been right up my alley 15 years ago.