kevinb9n

This was my thought too

It is very often used to mean simply "contradicts what seemed intuitive to me".

I hope that one day Bob's son and daughter will see this thread, and will enjoy through tears these beautiful memories of their father.

If that ever happens, D&S, I hoped I could say something to you. If you never see it, well, I tried.

It's like this. You're going to be bombarded your entire lives by people going on and on about what an incredible person your dad was. You will never get away from it. I know, because my mom was also one of those absolutely rare one-in-a-billion souls. And for 40 years I've been hearing the legend of Sharon.

But for some reason, no one ever once said to me: "you know what Kev? Please tell us what she was like. Who she was to us, that's just who she was to us. You knew sides of her that we never could, and who she was to you is so very very important too."

Never. Once.

I'm not asking you to answer that to me or anything. But I just wanted to say. Yes, please enjoy reading and hearing our memories of him. I think they will bring a smile to your face from time to time. But there is a bigger part of him that belongs to you and you alone. And that matters so, so much. Hold it close and never stop talking about him. Even if just to each other. Even if just to yourselves.

I'm so very sorry he was taken from you.

(Hey, I got through that without even an I-remember-you-when-you-were-this-big!) (butIdo)

Just to fill in some detail, Dagger was originally by jessewilson, but Bob was certainly highly involved. They were working together a lot then.

Thank you so much for posting these

I half expected we would find it on his long form birth certificate.

Thank you VERY much for keeping on top of this stuff, dang.

Yup. For one thing Bob wrote the map implementation that evolved into Guava's com.google.common.cache (for the confused: "Google Collections" was renamed to Guava). But also he was just one of the people that I always bounced ideas off of; he definitely had an impact.

(This was actually the late 00s though!)

(yes, your facts are correct here)

> He spent hours and hours bragging to me about people he was lucky enough to work with, and I've met many of them, and they're all like "he's got that all backwards".

YES, that is peak crazybob right there. Thanks, this was beautiful.

Wow. Thanks so much for telling me that.

At first, I didn't like Bob Lee. Then I met him.

I didn't know him when he joined my AdWords team in '04. He was the next to join after me. He was 24 (I was 29) and he was known by a fun nickname and he had already co-written a BOOK ferchrissakes.

Worse, he was going to be working on the stuff that I had asked to work on (but had been told we didn't have time for).

I had him sized up all right. I didn't like hotshot kids like that.

Then he pops into my cube one day and asks if I could help him get IntelliJ working.

This immediately surprised me. Hotshots don't ask random nobodies for help! In our field I guess it's the purest sign of humility and respect we have.

My times of not liking Bob Lee were over by about 12 seconds into that conversation.

Once we got it working, I casually mentioned something about the work he was assigned to do -- that I was so jealous about -- and I will never forget what he did. He said "yeah, so I was thinking we might do something like..." and just like that we were COLLABORATING.

That is who Bob was.

And we kept collaborating. He started fixing our dependency hairball issues using injection, and my friend Z and I eagerly adopted what he was building in a second subproject. Soon Bob and I were having interesting design discussions almost every day, figuring out how to turn his brilliant ideas into an open-source product. That became Guice.

When designing a new thing Bob was like a kid at Christmas. I have emails from him sent at odd hours with subjects like "we can solve <X> like <Y>!!" and no body. Classic Bob.

Bob was genuine, kind, and fully possessed of the joy of making things. And he was unlike any other tech person I've met.

His tech accomplishments go on for miles, but I am positive that the list of people like me whose lives he changed for the better is longer.

"If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them here!"