7 ms·
It's been great fun to follow bradfitz's career. I first learned of him from a post on Slashdot about a cool remote controlled door hack in a college dorm. His
by agar 7y ago
It's been great fun to follow bradfitz's career.
I first learned of him from a post on Slashdot about a cool remote controlled door hack in a college dorm. His roommate posted and basically said, "this guy is brilliant, it's just the tip of the iceberg - he posts what he's working on at bradfitz.com, check it out." This was in...1998? 1999?
Seeing him start to post a daily journal, get frustrated, then write LiveJournal was fascinating. Posts on the problems he faced scaling it, open discussions on caching architecture (leading to a LiveJournal user suggesting he investigate slab allocation technique that led to memcached), identity (leading to OpenID), moderation, etc. were always illuminating. Moving to Go because he understood what problems needed solving just made sense. Rewriting Google's downloader because it sucked? Well, of course he would.
I don't know Brad other than occasional comments/responses from the early livejournal days (user number ~10K, after procrastinating actually joining for too long), but it's clear that he draws inspiration from overcoming roadblocks.
Taken in that context, leaving Google is completely understandable - having a trillion dollar organization there to remove roadblocks would subvert a key driver for his personal innovation and inspiration.
Good for him that he recognized this and is taking the leap into the unknown. Can't wait to see what he comes up with next, but I'm guessing the real treasures will be found in the process and not the final outcome.
- bradfitz 7y agoHa, I forgot about that door opener! I found the page: https://bradfitz.com/misc/projects/remotedoor/ https://bradfitz.com/misc/projects/remotedoor/
- heed 7y agoThat looks like the Mercer dorm at the University of Washington!
- bradfitz 7y agoYup. RIP.
- ElderKorihor 7y agoHa. Around this same time my friends and I set up a vaguely similar system across campus in Haggett Hall. There was a :CueCat at the bottom of the door outside and you'd scan your student ID to trigger a solenoid to spin the doorknob on the inside.
- RobertRoberts 7y agoHow did you deal with people criticizing your masking tape construction? This has been a bane for me since I can remember. I love prototyping but hate the instant terrible feedback. People often look at the construction instead of the results and/or can't/won't imagine it a first step or how awesome a final product it can turn into.
- reaperducer 7y agoDo things for yourself, not for others. Don't even look at the comments. Turn them off if you can. They're not paying you, so you are under no obligation to please them. On the other hand, if you know that you're going to get undesired feedback, why post your stuff in public in the first place? You don't get the glory without the risk. Before the internet, people did things because they liked to, and because they enjoyed them. They didn't need the praise of a thousand random strangers to feel good about their accomplishments.
- RobertRoberts 7y agoSomething you didn't address, unwarranted critisim or just plain mean comments can just hurt or drain you emotionally. It can rob you of desire to work or entirely demotivate you from your original goal. While you may argue "deal with it", and rightly so in most circumstances, but then you are only addressing an issue of grit. I have plenty of grit in _some_ areas of my life, but not _all_ areas of my life. And, sometimes the negativity is unexpected like when you are just showing something you find cool or neat that you built. (ie, I have never once put my code out in public nor sought praise for it) Everyone has a limit where they can't take any more negative feedback on something. And with prototyping I have found it better to wait to show the client until it's in an "appealing" state. Hence my question about masking tape prototype. (my favorite material to build with as a kid because it was plentiful and easy to rip, but was unappealing visually)
- matz1 7y agoTo not give a fuck, like anything else is something that you can train yourself to get used to.
- lpgauth 7y agoOh wow, I remember reading this back in the day.
- zyang 7y agoI thought the name sound familiar. This is the guy that got really mad the Nest smoke alarm.
- bradfitz 7y agoIt got mad at me first.
- lonelappde 7y ago> having a trillion dollar organization there to remove roadblocks would subvert a key driver for his personal innovation and inspiration. I don't think anyone would say that Google is too cushy and roadblock free when it comes to getting things done. Mo' money, mo' problems.
- runjake 7y agoEmbarrassingly, I completely forgot bradfitz wrote Livejournal. He’s done so much cool stuff since then.