8 ms·

Goodbye Joyent

260 points by aberoham 7y ago

trevhead 7y ago
This is a beautiful goodbye. I don’t recognize most of the names but now I want to.
tgtweak 7y ago
What a joy to work with Bryan et al. Probably the best paid education you could imagine. Is Samsung doing nothing with joyent? Seems they could and should be competing heavily in the server space if not the public cloud itself more meaningfully than they seem to be today.
- skube 7y ago
  Mr. node.js on the server? That dood has done more harm to our industry than many.
- zeveb 7y ago
  > What a joy to work with Bryan et al. Presumably not for Ben Noordhuis: https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun That blog post is why I resolved never to do business with Bryan Cantrill or Joyent. I don't know if it influenced others to do likewise, but I can't imagine that it actually helped the company succeed.
  - appleflaxen 7y ago
    But the entire point of the post you linked is that they don't work together.
    - nosequel 7y ago
      It sounds to me like the parent was on Ben's side and he wanted to keep all the gendered pronouns in place.
  - ktm5j 7y ago
    So you don't want open source to be more inclusive? Seems like a silly reason for your decision.. I don't understand your motivation here.
    - theredbox 7y ago
      You should realize not all of us are americans and we dont care about your identity bullshit.
      - ktm5j 7y ago
        okay thanks.. still seems like a stupid decision
  - lurker20484 7y ago
    Wow, didn't realise Bryan was such a dick. What a shame.
    - ra33it 7y ago
      "an engineer that has so little empathy as to not understand why the use of gendered pronouns is a concern almost certainly makes poor technical decisions as well." lurker resembles this remark.
  - sgt 7y ago
    My goodness. Bryan Cantrill comes off as a complete fascist in that blog post. I can't believe he would actually post something like that on Joyent's domain. It's a personal attack on someone doing something he disagrees with. Shaming via a public space like that is just not done. It's okay to agree to disagree on a subject like gendered pronouns, just like it's okay to disagree on abortion laws or gun control.
- bgrainger 7y ago
  Joyent Public Cloud was shut down (three years after the Samsung acquisition): https://docs.joyent.com/joyent-public-cloud-eol https://docs.joyent.com/joyent-public-cloud-eol
mychael 7y ago
Slow news day?
- ludamad 7y ago
  I found it informative as a data point about the industry. The joy of Hacker News is comments from people with incredible passion/talent - this is just a long-form version.
sillysaurusx 7y ago
It’s kind of risky to have programmers who feel so passionately opinionated about the software that should power a business. It’s doubly tricky, because most companies pay lip service to passion. But like a chef that cares a bit too much about which cookware you use, it sometimes hinders the goal of serving 100 customers at noon. I respect that they’ve created their entire networking stack from the ground up. Few can claim the same. But objectively, the less eyeballs on a piece of code, the more risk. What will the company do if they’re hit by a bus? I’m not sure that companies should be measured in terms of “what if a dev suddenly goes away,” since creative work isn’t interchangeable like gears in a machine (nor would we want it to be). But it seems at least partly relevant. The tradeoff is that if you use unpopular software, like lisp, you can often gain more leverage in specific situations. HN’s software is the most flexible codebase I’ve ever seen, but few have ever studied it deeply. Viaweb used those principles to dominate the competition at a time when everybody was writing websites in C. But are those days gone? It might be an asset for a startup to use obscure software, so it’s definitely worth honing the skillset. I’m just not sure it’s a good idea to feel so strongly about business in particular. It has a way of burning you.
- zelly 7y ago
  > The tradeoff is that if you use unpopular software, like lisp, you can often gain more leverage in specific situations. HN’s software is the most flexible codebase I’ve ever seen, but few have ever studied it deeply. Viaweb used those principles to dominate the competition at a time when everybody was writing websites in C. But are those days gone? In Paul Graham's days, Lisp was not as unpopular as it is today. It was more like choosing to use Ruby in 2020. On its way out but still in the public consciousness.
  - sillysaurusx 7y ago
    Hmm. I think Viaweb was the first web application (or at least, no one's disputed that claim) and they kept their choice to use lisp a secret until acquisition. If someone else was using lisp to make websites, it seems like they must have independently rediscovered the idea. It was started in 1995 and acquired in 1998, so that wasn't a very long time for lisp to come into the public consciousness. It seems like at best it was considered an AI research language.
mberning 7y ago
The good ol RIF. Must have some fortune 500 alums working in HR or the C suite. Too bad they didn’t offer VJRP or SERO.
- techslave 7y ago
  well it is samsung... one of the largest companies in the world
qubex 7y ago
I had to look up ‘SmartOS’ and ‘OmniOS’ because I had no idea what they are. NOTE: This isn’t meant as an insult; it’s just that often people use terms as if they were universally known. He had hyperlinks to some of the more obscure items on the list but not the key items.
- pushpop 7y ago
  I’m surprised. They were massive names in the OS scene until recently. Their lineage can be traced back to Solaris and share many of the cool technologies that Sun developers pioneered. So much so that for the first few years of SmartOS, Linux felt like a hobbyist platform in comparison due to its lack of dtrace, containerisations, ZFS, etc. Linux has come a long way since, which is a large part of the reason why SmartOS has become less relevant. The latter being a great shame because competition breeds innovation and we are losing a lot of interesting interesting Unixes from the public consciousness. Edit: oh come on. I post this and it almost immediately gets negative karma despite being both factual and informative. A perfect example of the rife abuse of peer moderation on this site. I honestly don’t think I’ll bother wasting my time on here any more.
  - qubex 7y ago
    +1 for your reply and to cheer you up. I also got down-voted to hell for posting that rather innocuous comment — don’t let it get to you. As for the element of surprise, not everybody moves in the same circles. You might be deep into server-grade operating systems, or DevOps, or other branches of information technology that are far from my daily experience. I haunt the areas associated with theoretical computer science, applied mathematics, finance, and the ins-and-outs of the (European) payments system. Each of our haunts are so vast that it’s easy to be erudite in general and yet still pretty ignorant of things others take for granted.
  - RantyDave 7y ago
    I did a lot with SmartOS and, eventually, Linux got good enough. But also, Kubernetes won everything, ZFS ended up in everything, and dtrace ended up in most things. It was a thing of beauty but I can't say I ever felt like I properly understood it.
anon102010 7y ago
The mongoDB comment rings true at least from the past Never heard of the OS mentioned
- qubex 7y ago
  > Never heard of the OS mentioned I hope for your sake that this admission won’t cause you to be brutally downvoted too. Here’s a pre-emptive +1 ;)
  - qubex 7y ago
    Downvoted because I dared to point out that I had been downvoted elsewhere. What is wrong with the denizens here nowadays??
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - spdionis 7y ago
      > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - qubex 7y ago
        “Please” being the operative term in “please don’t – to be perfectly frank, if I see people behaving fanatically, I’m going to mention it. Elsewhere others beyond myself were downvoted for simply mentioning that they’d never heard of the OSes mentioned before. Is that deserving of downvoting? No. Am I going to stay quiet about it? Again, no. Do I care if I will be downvoted to hell and below? For the third time, no. I consider the behaviour of others to be far more rude – and such behaviour is on the rise. If it is hidden behind a rule that has the side-effect of making it impossible to call such behaviour out, I’m going to disregard that rule – as I am doing now.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
webo 7y ago
Very very few developers these days get to work on such low level stack. It just sounds very technically challenging yet fun. Wish him good luck to find something related in his next venture.
wmf 7y ago
I guess Oxide will be picking up some more people.
patkai 7y ago
It is the sign of terrible incompetence to downsize people like him. If you ever get hold of people with this much competence then find a clever project for them, or create a new subsidiary.
- RantyDave 7y ago
  Yes, it is. But sometimes you've just got to start shutting these things down if they're not going very well.
- user5994461 7y ago
  The company is doing poorly and it's a miracle it's not closed yet. Better not judge a dying company for laying off (all) its staff.
  - patkai 7y ago
    No way I am judging the company, meaning Joyent. But Samsung Electronics owns them, so what I expect is they realise they sit on a goldmine of talent, and if Joyent products are not doing well then they reinvest that talent in something else.
jtuple 7y ago
Sad news. But, not unexpected given the state of Joyent in recent years. Really happy Z got a chance to work at Joyent though, even if it was only for a few years. For most of us ex-Basho (ie. Riak) engineers, Basho was a career highlight. We've mostly moved on to better paying, more stable jobs, but lost the magic / passion / joy that we had at Basho. Ryan's the exception. I imagine he's loved his time at Joyent as much, if not more, than Basho. Here's hoping lightning strikes for a third time and Ryan lands somewhere great after his winter break.
gexla 7y ago
Always interesting to hear the name Joyent again. The company has had quite the colorful history. Starting from a productivity suite I never understood to then moving into hosting to eventually becoming a major cloud computing provider. I used some of their Solaris VM's and never had a problem getting eased in. Learning how to get around in one seemed to be just a bit more work than learning a different Linux distro. The company was fun to be a customer of even if I did lose my Mixed Grill, later upgraded to the 3 Martini Lunch. I imagine even more fun to work for.
emmanueloga_ 7y ago
re: Design. This blog uses the Triplicate font, which is the only font I ever purchased if memory serves :-) [1] 1: https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html
kantord 7y ago
Joyen't
mathattack 7y ago
Interesting that he throws MongoDB under the bus. I’ve heard a lot of negativity about them lately.
- techslave 7y ago
  lately? MDB has always been awful. Then again i did work at the largest MDB deployment (per MDB themselves) so saw all the problems.
  - mathattack 7y ago
    Technical problems or commercial?
vanderZwan 7y ago
> I read a lot of code too, which wasn’t always easy, but sometimes I was lucky enough to find myself treated to one of Robert’s epic block comments[0]. He wasn't exaggerating, that is an epic, beautiful, I would even say humbling block comment to read. It's completely outside of my regular knowledge domain but that is not at all required to appreciate it. [0] https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent/blob/dff0473c792fc5c3ef7c3d862e557fe201a5d671/usr/src/uts/common/io/mac/mac_sched.c#L28-L967 https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent/blob/dff0473c792fc5...
- techslave 7y ago
  it’s a horrible comment. OTOH it’s world class documentation. obviously i’m not comparing myself, but i often find myself the only one at my $JOB that documents things at similar level. 99% of the time because i’m touching code i don’t understand and need to understand it first. writing the doco is the way i do it. software would be soooo much better if we lived in a world where a) engineering practice demanded devs document this well, and b) the majority of devs had the skill to write so well. market pressure however demands faster delivery times, and who cares about the tech debt.
bsg75 7y ago
> I feel like I was just starting to ease into my all-night rager as an illumos kernel developer, only to have 5-0 break it up before I could jump off the roof into the pool. I was surprised at how appropriate and familiar this phrasing felt.

260 points by aberoham 7y ago

This is a beautiful goodbye. I don’t recognize most of the names but now I want to.

What a joy to work with Bryan et al. Probably the best paid education you could imagine. Is Samsung doing nothing with joyent? Seems they could and should be competing heavily in the server space if not the public cloud itself more meaningfully than they seem to be today.

skube 7y ago
Mr. node.js on the server? That dood has done more harm to our industry than many.
zeveb 7y ago
> What a joy to work with Bryan et al. Presumably not for Ben Noordhuis: https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun That blog post is why I resolved never to do business with Bryan Cantrill or Joyent. I don't know if it influenced others to do likewise, but I can't imagine that it actually helped the company succeed.
- appleflaxen 7y ago
  But the entire point of the post you linked is that they don't work together.
  - nosequel 7y ago
    It sounds to me like the parent was on Ben's side and he wanted to keep all the gendered pronouns in place.
- ktm5j 7y ago
  So you don't want open source to be more inclusive? Seems like a silly reason for your decision.. I don't understand your motivation here.
  - theredbox 7y ago
    You should realize not all of us are americans and we dont care about your identity bullshit.
    - ktm5j 7y ago
      okay thanks.. still seems like a stupid decision
- lurker20484 7y ago
  Wow, didn't realise Bryan was such a dick. What a shame.
  - ra33it 7y ago
    "an engineer that has so little empathy as to not understand why the use of gendered pronouns is a concern almost certainly makes poor technical decisions as well." lurker resembles this remark.
- sgt 7y ago
  My goodness. Bryan Cantrill comes off as a complete fascist in that blog post. I can't believe he would actually post something like that on Joyent's domain. It's a personal attack on someone doing something he disagrees with. Shaming via a public space like that is just not done. It's okay to agree to disagree on a subject like gendered pronouns, just like it's okay to disagree on abortion laws or gun control.
bgrainger 7y ago
Joyent Public Cloud was shut down (three years after the Samsung acquisition): https://docs.joyent.com/joyent-public-cloud-eol https://docs.joyent.com/joyent-public-cloud-eol

mychael 7y ago

Slow news day?

ludamad 7y ago
I found it informative as a data point about the industry. The joy of Hacker News is comments from people with incredible passion/talent - this is just a long-form version.

sillysaurusx 7y ago

It’s kind of risky to have programmers who feel so passionately opinionated about the software that should power a business. It’s doubly tricky, because most companies pay lip service to passion. But like a chef that cares a bit too much about which cookware you use, it sometimes hinders the goal of serving 100 customers at noon. I respect that they’ve created their entire networking stack from the ground up. Few can claim the same. But objectively, the less eyeballs on a piece of code, the more risk. What will the company do if they’re hit by a bus? I’m not sure that companies should be measured in terms of “what if a dev suddenly goes away,” since creative work isn’t interchangeable like gears in a machine (nor would we want it to be). But it seems at least partly relevant. The tradeoff is that if you use unpopular software, like lisp, you can often gain more leverage in specific situations. HN’s software is the most flexible codebase I’ve ever seen, but few have ever studied it deeply. Viaweb used those principles to dominate the competition at a time when everybody was writing websites in C. But are those days gone? It might be an asset for a startup to use obscure software, so it’s definitely worth honing the skillset. I’m just not sure it’s a good idea to feel so strongly about business in particular. It has a way of burning you.

zelly 7y ago
> The tradeoff is that if you use unpopular software, like lisp, you can often gain more leverage in specific situations. HN’s software is the most flexible codebase I’ve ever seen, but few have ever studied it deeply. Viaweb used those principles to dominate the competition at a time when everybody was writing websites in C. But are those days gone? In Paul Graham's days, Lisp was not as unpopular as it is today. It was more like choosing to use Ruby in 2020. On its way out but still in the public consciousness.
- sillysaurusx 7y ago
  Hmm. I think Viaweb was the first web application (or at least, no one's disputed that claim) and they kept their choice to use lisp a secret until acquisition. If someone else was using lisp to make websites, it seems like they must have independently rediscovered the idea. It was started in 1995 and acquired in 1998, so that wasn't a very long time for lisp to come into the public consciousness. It seems like at best it was considered an AI research language.

mberning 7y ago

The good ol RIF. Must have some fortune 500 alums working in HR or the C suite. Too bad they didn’t offer VJRP or SERO.

techslave 7y ago
well it is samsung... one of the largest companies in the world

qubex 7y ago

I had to look up ‘SmartOS’ and ‘OmniOS’ because I had no idea what they are. NOTE: This isn’t meant as an insult; it’s just that often people use terms as if they were universally known. He had hyperlinks to some of the more obscure items on the list but not the key items.

pushpop 7y ago
I’m surprised. They were massive names in the OS scene until recently. Their lineage can be traced back to Solaris and share many of the cool technologies that Sun developers pioneered. So much so that for the first few years of SmartOS, Linux felt like a hobbyist platform in comparison due to its lack of dtrace, containerisations, ZFS, etc. Linux has come a long way since, which is a large part of the reason why SmartOS has become less relevant. The latter being a great shame because competition breeds innovation and we are losing a lot of interesting interesting Unixes from the public consciousness. Edit: oh come on. I post this and it almost immediately gets negative karma despite being both factual and informative. A perfect example of the rife abuse of peer moderation on this site. I honestly don’t think I’ll bother wasting my time on here any more.
- qubex 7y ago
  +1 for your reply and to cheer you up. I also got down-voted to hell for posting that rather innocuous comment — don’t let it get to you. As for the element of surprise, not everybody moves in the same circles. You might be deep into server-grade operating systems, or DevOps, or other branches of information technology that are far from my daily experience. I haunt the areas associated with theoretical computer science, applied mathematics, finance, and the ins-and-outs of the (European) payments system. Each of our haunts are so vast that it’s easy to be erudite in general and yet still pretty ignorant of things others take for granted.
- RantyDave 7y ago
  I did a lot with SmartOS and, eventually, Linux got good enough. But also, Kubernetes won everything, ZFS ended up in everything, and dtrace ended up in most things. It was a thing of beauty but I can't say I ever felt like I properly understood it.

anon102010 7y ago

The mongoDB comment rings true at least from the past Never heard of the OS mentioned

qubex 7y ago
> Never heard of the OS mentioned I hope for your sake that this admission won’t cause you to be brutally downvoted too. Here’s a pre-emptive +1 ;)
- qubex 7y ago
  Downvoted because I dared to point out that I had been downvoted elsewhere. What is wrong with the denizens here nowadays??
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - spdionis 7y ago
    > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - qubex 7y ago
      “Please” being the operative term in “please don’t – to be perfectly frank, if I see people behaving fanatically, I’m going to mention it. Elsewhere others beyond myself were downvoted for simply mentioning that they’d never heard of the OSes mentioned before. Is that deserving of downvoting? No. Am I going to stay quiet about it? Again, no. Do I care if I will be downvoted to hell and below? For the third time, no. I consider the behaviour of others to be far more rude – and such behaviour is on the rise. If it is hidden behind a rule that has the side-effect of making it impossible to call such behaviour out, I’m going to disregard that rule – as I am doing now.
goatinaboat 7y ago

webo 7y ago

Very very few developers these days get to work on such low level stack. It just sounds very technically challenging yet fun. Wish him good luck to find something related in his next venture.

wmf 7y ago

I guess Oxide will be picking up some more people.

patkai 7y ago

It is the sign of terrible incompetence to downsize people like him. If you ever get hold of people with this much competence then find a clever project for them, or create a new subsidiary.

RantyDave 7y ago
Yes, it is. But sometimes you've just got to start shutting these things down if they're not going very well.
user5994461 7y ago
The company is doing poorly and it's a miracle it's not closed yet. Better not judge a dying company for laying off (all) its staff.
- patkai 7y ago
  No way I am judging the company, meaning Joyent. But Samsung Electronics owns them, so what I expect is they realise they sit on a goldmine of talent, and if Joyent products are not doing well then they reinvest that talent in something else.

jtuple 7y ago

Sad news. But, not unexpected given the state of Joyent in recent years. Really happy Z got a chance to work at Joyent though, even if it was only for a few years. For most of us ex-Basho (ie. Riak) engineers, Basho was a career highlight. We've mostly moved on to better paying, more stable jobs, but lost the magic / passion / joy that we had at Basho. Ryan's the exception. I imagine he's loved his time at Joyent as much, if not more, than Basho. Here's hoping lightning strikes for a third time and Ryan lands somewhere great after his winter break.

gexla 7y ago

Always interesting to hear the name Joyent again. The company has had quite the colorful history. Starting from a productivity suite I never understood to then moving into hosting to eventually becoming a major cloud computing provider. I used some of their Solaris VM's and never had a problem getting eased in. Learning how to get around in one seemed to be just a bit more work than learning a different Linux distro. The company was fun to be a customer of even if I did lose my Mixed Grill, later upgraded to the 3 Martini Lunch. I imagine even more fun to work for.

emmanueloga_ 7y ago

re: Design. This blog uses the Triplicate font, which is the only font I ever purchased if memory serves :-) [1] 1: https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html

kantord 7y ago

Joyen't

mathattack 7y ago

Interesting that he throws MongoDB under the bus. I’ve heard a lot of negativity about them lately.

techslave 7y ago
lately? MDB has always been awful. Then again i did work at the largest MDB deployment (per MDB themselves) so saw all the problems.
- mathattack 7y ago
  Technical problems or commercial?

vanderZwan 7y ago

> I read a lot of code too, which wasn’t always easy, but sometimes I was lucky enough to find myself treated to one of Robert’s epic block comments[0]. He wasn't exaggerating, that is an epic, beautiful, I would even say humbling block comment to read. It's completely outside of my regular knowledge domain but that is not at all required to appreciate it. [0] https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent/blob/dff0473c792fc5c3ef7c3d862e557fe201a5d671/usr/src/uts/common/io/mac/mac_sched.c#L28-L967 https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent/blob/dff0473c792fc5...

techslave 7y ago
it’s a horrible comment. OTOH it’s world class documentation. obviously i’m not comparing myself, but i often find myself the only one at my $JOB that documents things at similar level. 99% of the time because i’m touching code i don’t understand and need to understand it first. writing the doco is the way i do it. software would be soooo much better if we lived in a world where a) engineering practice demanded devs document this well, and b) the majority of devs had the skill to write so well. market pressure however demands faster delivery times, and who cares about the tech debt.

bsg75 7y ago

> I feel like I was just starting to ease into my all-night rager as an illumos kernel developer, only to have 5-0 break it up before I could jump off the roof into the pool. I was surprised at how appropriate and familiar this phrasing felt.