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> You may know me from building the Go Language, Docker, MongoDB, Hugo, Cobra, Drupal and spf13-vim Actually this is the first time i heard from this guy, but

> You may know me from building the Go Language, Docker, MongoDB, Hugo, Cobra, Drupal and spf13-vim Actually this is the first time i heard from this guy, but this is an impressive list of projects to be involved in, wow!

mupuff1234 4y ago
Am I the only one who finds that type of phrasing distasteful? I'm sure he didn't build any of those alone, and as a "leader" and a product person he probably didn't do much of the "building". Seems like he was mostly in an advisory role for Drupal, Docker and MongoDB, he didn't exactly build them.
- alecbz 4y ago
  Afaik the last 3-4 are actually largely his personal projects that he probably built most of himself. But yeah, kinda agree for the other ones, the phrasing feels a little self-aggrandizing to my ear. Not sure how intentional it is though, that kind of phrasing I think sort just sneaks into the lexicon for some.
  - 1-6 4y ago
    So basically a Googler, nonetheless.
    - alecbz 4y ago
      Have you found Googlers to be self-aggrandizing on average? That's not been my experience working there. (But might be different for "Googlers who talk a lot/are well-known publicly".)
      - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
        From the outside peering in, the only Googlers are the ones who talk a lot or loudly leverage their ex-googler status on other projects.
        fragmede 4y ago
        Well but the ones who aren't loud and don't bring it up constantly, you wouldn't know that about them.
        MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
        That's exactly my point.
        cmrdporcupine 4y ago
        It's our way of trying to make something out of all the lost years working away in the salt^H^H^H^Hprotobuf mines. We have to use the 'leverage' because all else we'd have left is money in the bank account and skill sets incompatible with most other places in the industry.
        alecbz 4y ago
        Right, that's what I meant. I don't think the average Googler is self-aggrandizing, but if you don't work at Google or have a big friend circle that works there, then there's a selection bias for the Googlers you do know.
      - hnfong 4y ago
        I'm just speculating, but it might be due to all the practice with writing promo packets...
    - seneca 4y ago
      Heh, as much as I hate painting with that wide of a brush it does seem accurate. Something about Google breeds hubris and self aggrandizement.
      - dylan604 4y ago
        There are certain phrases that just saying them as a matter of fact will always risk sounding self aggrandizing. "I work for Google" has become one. "I'm a Googler" just has me pivot and walk away. Another infamous one, "I work at the White House."
      - pm90 4y ago
        > Something about Google breeds hubris and self aggrandizement. This is true about any successful institution in general. I noticed it first with Universities but it applies to jobs as well.
        wawjgreen 4y ago
        I know an MIT PhD (natural sciences) who thinks too highly of herself--when I beat her in the Chinese game of Wuziqi (She's Chinese and has beaten the computer and played nearly all her 20+ years), she was so pissed off....She still had that hubris and self-aggrandizement though, until she discovered by chance, that I used to teach mathematics at one of her Alma maters. After that she became sort of an enemy. This is the problem with self-aggrandizing people.
- seneca 4y ago
  > Am I the only one who finds that type of phrasing distasteful? Generally, I'm with you. In this case, I'm only half with you (the phrasing around Go and Docker could use some humility), but he really did build Hugo and Cobra. He contributed quite a bit to the Go ecosystem, he's not just some product person taking credit for work other people actually did.
- rubygloomed 4y ago
  Creating something is often just a small group, but teams build things. Linus created Linux, but 1000s of people built it. This guy isn't claiming to have built any of these alone, just claiming that these projects are where you'd recognize him from.
- spf13 4y ago
  I never intended this statement to be taken as if I built these alone. Thanks for this candid feedback. Perhaps a more accurate wording is: "You may know me from helping to build the Go Language, Docker, MongoDB, and Drupal & creating Hugo, Cobra and spf13-vim"
  - ignoramous 4y ago
    Helped building it or actually built it... Impressive just the same! Congratulations on your new role. Two Sigma seems super-exciting.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    This much more clear and honestly more impressive (because the first four are so obviously group effort that I discounted the last two - I had my suspicions about spf13-vim, though).
  - salmo 4y ago
    I think your wording was fine. I didn’t read that into it at all. Of course you worked with folks to do them. You also spent the majority of the post thanking people you worked with. I’ve also read your code. I enjoy it and learned a lot more of go that way. Whatever. Thanks for helping make Go so much fun for me. I look for excuses to write CLIs with Cobra/Viper. They’re of a very few set of libraries I look forward to using. I use Hugo for much more than it was intended for. Heck, I wrote a CLI with Cobra around Hugo and a simple theme for my personal note taking and todo management. I was annoyed with other markdown note tools and DIY was a fun waste of time :).
  - mbd64 4y ago
    No, Steve that is not accurate. You didn't build MongoDB, Docker or Go. They were all wildly successful before you came on board. It's dishonest of you to insinuate that you built or helped build the core products. I can speak first hand for 10gen. For Docker you were not even there for a year, and for Go Rob was pretty clear who helped build it - Ian, Russ, Adam and a long list of people. You were ancillary involved around the periphery of all these. Having worked on all these should be good enough you don't need to embellish and constantly overstate and lie about your contributions. Let other people talk about how great you are.
- xcambar 4y ago
  This specific, quoted, phrase doesn't bother memuch, but I agree that reading the whole article gave me, from top to bottom, a sour taste of personal branding and developer marketing that really doesn't sell it (to me).
- tony 4y ago
  I contribute to open source projects as well - in various capacities - and it's fine for a maintainer of a huge project to use that wording. He pushed hugo and viper in 2013-2014: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/commits/v0.7 https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/commits/v0.7, viper: https://github.com/spf13/viper/commit/98be071 https://github.com/spf13/viper/commit/98be071 Steve is a very accomplished programmer, with what hugo / viper became in the go ecosystem by itself. In my view, the projects also jumpstarted a lot of new users who were trying out golang who weren't sold on it yet. I didn't really notice his leadership or advisory roles until now, that's just icing on the cake. Thanks for your contributions, Steve! Edit: If it's really big ecosystem, _indirect_ contributions also matter. e.g. in python, even if you're not writing CPython patches or PEPs, community based projects do a lot to shape best practices and even bubble up into standard library.
- sleepytimetea 4y ago
  Yeah, wow, exaggerations everywhere ! Very distasteful. His LinkedIn profile says: "I’m responsible for taking Go Language, Docker and MongoDB from niche technologies to widespread mainstream enterprise adoption." W O W, really ?
  - mbd64 4y ago
    Yeah, he's a consummate self-promoter and exaggerator I was at Mongo at the same time. He worked on the drupal website which was a godawful mess. Then there was the Drivers team. He spent 3 years there, was absent most of the time working on Hugo while employed at Mongo. Mongo probably owns most of the IP for it. I am not sure what he did at Docker but he'd like you to believe the 10 months he spent there was pivotal to docker adoption, nevermind the fact it was already on fire.
    - h4ckth3pl4n3t 4y ago
      Wow! Jealous much. His LinkedIn says he started at MongoDB in 2011. The first commit to Hugo was in 2013, a full two years later. Your story doesn't add up at all.
      - mbd64 4y ago
        Jealous? NO. Someone just needed to finally call him out on his bullshit. He left in the middle of 2014. He was checked out for a long time. I'd say that timeline adds up pretty nicely. So while Steve would like take credit for Mongo's enterprise adoption he barely had anything to do with it. Not with the Server, not with Cloud, not with Sales, Marketing or Education.
        10genvictim 4y ago
        What a strange world 2022 is, wherein former employees of MongoDB openly catfight on HN over who was most responsible for suckering some of the Fortune 500 into buying a truckload of technical debt. Arguing over that like it’s taking principal credit for achieving sustained cold fusion. Baffling. We all contribute to poop. Our level of contribution to said poop does not diminish that, in fact, we all work on poop so we’re all in the same poop boat. Take it easy on each other, and reserve the bullshit calling for those who really earn it, like the folks who initially built the poop you’re claiming by cleverly offshoring their minimum maturity on the financial and sweat equity of every early adopter. Like, say, for example, for no particular reason, my team at the exact time you’re arguing about. It’s fine, though, I get it, that’s valley capital, fake it until you make it, give us ops teams ulcers, we make goodish money. Just weird to see resentment over who can claim MongoDB success with that kind of perspective is all. Particularly since the success at the time was all lazy developer mindshare (no disrespect, I’m lazy too), and the technical weaknesses started a few ten-year roadmaps that are now in the market and obsolete MongoDB.
- userbinator 4y ago
  In contrast, I think someone like Fabrice Bellard could absolutely use such phrasing without overselling himself... but then again, Bellard doesn't seem to exactly brag about his accomplishments either.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bogota 4y ago
  These comments are why i stopped sharing my work. You can clearly tell that it is not the authors intent but someone (you) will always take things personal when given the chance.
akomtu 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mountainriver 4y ago
  The most critical of skills to succeed in software
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  I'd hope so; it would be pretty damn embarrassing if you couldn't do a slightly advanced fuzz buzz.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    A tree is just a type of graph. A graph can be represented as an adjacency matrix. So come up with that matrix, then drop it into lapack for inversion. Lapack is well optimized so this is probably a very good solution.
    - dekhn 4y ago
      I haven't thought about this before, but I can't see how this would work. Instead, you'd convert to an adjacency matrix (with edge directions by only populating the upper rectangular region), then transpose the matrix, then convert back to a graph. The transpose should swap the i, j pair edge directions. Matrix inversion is super-expensive and I think it would produce somethign else entirely, probably not unlike matrix decomposition, which can extract centrality properties of the nodes. But it's super expensive.
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        Yep! It was not a serious suggestion, just a joke based on taking a circuitous route through the language.
lf-non 4y ago
I briefly used youtube's spfjs library for something people now a days call island architecture. Given the name similarity, I was wondering if the author also had some involvement in that library, but looks like not.

mupuff1234 4y ago

Am I the only one who finds that type of phrasing distasteful? I'm sure he didn't build any of those alone, and as a "leader" and a product person he probably didn't do much of the "building". Seems like he was mostly in an advisory role for Drupal, Docker and MongoDB, he didn't exactly build them.

alecbz 4y ago
Afaik the last 3-4 are actually largely his personal projects that he probably built most of himself. But yeah, kinda agree for the other ones, the phrasing feels a little self-aggrandizing to my ear. Not sure how intentional it is though, that kind of phrasing I think sort just sneaks into the lexicon for some.
- 1-6 4y ago
  So basically a Googler, nonetheless.
  - alecbz 4y ago
    Have you found Googlers to be self-aggrandizing on average? That's not been my experience working there. (But might be different for "Googlers who talk a lot/are well-known publicly".)
    - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      From the outside peering in, the only Googlers are the ones who talk a lot or loudly leverage their ex-googler status on other projects.
      - fragmede 4y ago
        Well but the ones who aren't loud and don't bring it up constantly, you wouldn't know that about them.
        MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
        That's exactly my point.
      - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
        It's our way of trying to make something out of all the lost years working away in the salt^H^H^H^Hprotobuf mines. We have to use the 'leverage' because all else we'd have left is money in the bank account and skill sets incompatible with most other places in the industry.
      - alecbz 4y ago
        Right, that's what I meant. I don't think the average Googler is self-aggrandizing, but if you don't work at Google or have a big friend circle that works there, then there's a selection bias for the Googlers you do know.
    - hnfong 4y ago
      I'm just speculating, but it might be due to all the practice with writing promo packets...
  - seneca 4y ago
    Heh, as much as I hate painting with that wide of a brush it does seem accurate. Something about Google breeds hubris and self aggrandizement.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      There are certain phrases that just saying them as a matter of fact will always risk sounding self aggrandizing. "I work for Google" has become one. "I'm a Googler" just has me pivot and walk away. Another infamous one, "I work at the White House."
    - pm90 4y ago
      > Something about Google breeds hubris and self aggrandizement. This is true about any successful institution in general. I noticed it first with Universities but it applies to jobs as well.
      - wawjgreen 4y ago
        I know an MIT PhD (natural sciences) who thinks too highly of herself--when I beat her in the Chinese game of Wuziqi (She's Chinese and has beaten the computer and played nearly all her 20+ years), she was so pissed off....She still had that hubris and self-aggrandizement though, until she discovered by chance, that I used to teach mathematics at one of her Alma maters. After that she became sort of an enemy. This is the problem with self-aggrandizing people.
seneca 4y ago
> Am I the only one who finds that type of phrasing distasteful? Generally, I'm with you. In this case, I'm only half with you (the phrasing around Go and Docker could use some humility), but he really did build Hugo and Cobra. He contributed quite a bit to the Go ecosystem, he's not just some product person taking credit for work other people actually did.
rubygloomed 4y ago
Creating something is often just a small group, but teams build things. Linus created Linux, but 1000s of people built it. This guy isn't claiming to have built any of these alone, just claiming that these projects are where you'd recognize him from.
spf13 4y ago
I never intended this statement to be taken as if I built these alone. Thanks for this candid feedback. Perhaps a more accurate wording is: "You may know me from helping to build the Go Language, Docker, MongoDB, and Drupal & creating Hugo, Cobra and spf13-vim"
- ignoramous 4y ago
  Helped building it or actually built it... Impressive just the same! Congratulations on your new role. Two Sigma seems super-exciting.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This much more clear and honestly more impressive (because the first four are so obviously group effort that I discounted the last two - I had my suspicions about spf13-vim, though).
- salmo 4y ago
  I think your wording was fine. I didn’t read that into it at all. Of course you worked with folks to do them. You also spent the majority of the post thanking people you worked with. I’ve also read your code. I enjoy it and learned a lot more of go that way. Whatever. Thanks for helping make Go so much fun for me. I look for excuses to write CLIs with Cobra/Viper. They’re of a very few set of libraries I look forward to using. I use Hugo for much more than it was intended for. Heck, I wrote a CLI with Cobra around Hugo and a simple theme for my personal note taking and todo management. I was annoyed with other markdown note tools and DIY was a fun waste of time :).
- mbd64 4y ago
  No, Steve that is not accurate. You didn't build MongoDB, Docker or Go. They were all wildly successful before you came on board. It's dishonest of you to insinuate that you built or helped build the core products. I can speak first hand for 10gen. For Docker you were not even there for a year, and for Go Rob was pretty clear who helped build it - Ian, Russ, Adam and a long list of people. You were ancillary involved around the periphery of all these. Having worked on all these should be good enough you don't need to embellish and constantly overstate and lie about your contributions. Let other people talk about how great you are.
xcambar 4y ago
This specific, quoted, phrase doesn't bother memuch, but I agree that reading the whole article gave me, from top to bottom, a sour taste of personal branding and developer marketing that really doesn't sell it (to me).
tony 4y ago
I contribute to open source projects as well - in various capacities - and it's fine for a maintainer of a huge project to use that wording. He pushed hugo and viper in 2013-2014: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/commits/v0.7 https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/commits/v0.7, viper: https://github.com/spf13/viper/commit/98be071 https://github.com/spf13/viper/commit/98be071 Steve is a very accomplished programmer, with what hugo / viper became in the go ecosystem by itself. In my view, the projects also jumpstarted a lot of new users who were trying out golang who weren't sold on it yet. I didn't really notice his leadership or advisory roles until now, that's just icing on the cake. Thanks for your contributions, Steve! Edit: If it's really big ecosystem, _indirect_ contributions also matter. e.g. in python, even if you're not writing CPython patches or PEPs, community based projects do a lot to shape best practices and even bubble up into standard library.
sleepytimetea 4y ago
Yeah, wow, exaggerations everywhere ! Very distasteful. His LinkedIn profile says: "I’m responsible for taking Go Language, Docker and MongoDB from niche technologies to widespread mainstream enterprise adoption." W O W, really ?
- mbd64 4y ago
  Yeah, he's a consummate self-promoter and exaggerator I was at Mongo at the same time. He worked on the drupal website which was a godawful mess. Then there was the Drivers team. He spent 3 years there, was absent most of the time working on Hugo while employed at Mongo. Mongo probably owns most of the IP for it. I am not sure what he did at Docker but he'd like you to believe the 10 months he spent there was pivotal to docker adoption, nevermind the fact it was already on fire.
  - h4ckth3pl4n3t 4y ago
    Wow! Jealous much. His LinkedIn says he started at MongoDB in 2011. The first commit to Hugo was in 2013, a full two years later. Your story doesn't add up at all.
    - mbd64 4y ago
      Jealous? NO. Someone just needed to finally call him out on his bullshit. He left in the middle of 2014. He was checked out for a long time. I'd say that timeline adds up pretty nicely. So while Steve would like take credit for Mongo's enterprise adoption he barely had anything to do with it. Not with the Server, not with Cloud, not with Sales, Marketing or Education.
      - 10genvictim 4y ago
        What a strange world 2022 is, wherein former employees of MongoDB openly catfight on HN over who was most responsible for suckering some of the Fortune 500 into buying a truckload of technical debt. Arguing over that like it’s taking principal credit for achieving sustained cold fusion. Baffling. We all contribute to poop. Our level of contribution to said poop does not diminish that, in fact, we all work on poop so we’re all in the same poop boat. Take it easy on each other, and reserve the bullshit calling for those who really earn it, like the folks who initially built the poop you’re claiming by cleverly offshoring their minimum maturity on the financial and sweat equity of every early adopter. Like, say, for example, for no particular reason, my team at the exact time you’re arguing about. It’s fine, though, I get it, that’s valley capital, fake it until you make it, give us ops teams ulcers, we make goodish money. Just weird to see resentment over who can claim MongoDB success with that kind of perspective is all. Particularly since the success at the time was all lazy developer mindshare (no disrespect, I’m lazy too), and the technical weaknesses started a few ten-year roadmaps that are now in the market and obsolete MongoDB.
userbinator 4y ago
In contrast, I think someone like Fabrice Bellard could absolutely use such phrasing without overselling himself... but then again, Bellard doesn't seem to exactly brag about his accomplishments either.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bogota 4y ago
These comments are why i stopped sharing my work. You can clearly tell that it is not the authors intent but someone (you) will always take things personal when given the chance.

akomtu 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mountainriver 4y ago
The most critical of skills to succeed in software
tick_tock_tick 4y ago
I'd hope so; it would be pretty damn embarrassing if you couldn't do a slightly advanced fuzz buzz.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  A tree is just a type of graph. A graph can be represented as an adjacency matrix. So come up with that matrix, then drop it into lapack for inversion. Lapack is well optimized so this is probably a very good solution.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    I haven't thought about this before, but I can't see how this would work. Instead, you'd convert to an adjacency matrix (with edge directions by only populating the upper rectangular region), then transpose the matrix, then convert back to a graph. The transpose should swap the i, j pair edge directions. Matrix inversion is super-expensive and I think it would produce somethign else entirely, probably not unlike matrix decomposition, which can extract centrality properties of the nodes. But it's super expensive.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      Yep! It was not a serious suggestion, just a joke based on taking a circuitous route through the language.

lf-non 4y ago

I briefly used youtube's spfjs library for something people now a days call island architecture. Given the name similarity, I was wondering if the author also had some involvement in that library, but looks like not.