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Do you remember TJ Holowaychuk?

25 points by fuzzymind ↗ HN
TJ (https://github.com/tj) used to be a significant JavaScript contributor and could easily be labeled as the "rockstar" of the time. In 2014 he switched from Node to Go (https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/farewell-node-js-4ba9e7f3e52b) and I haven't heard of him ever since. Is it just me, or is there a correlation?

12 comments

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samblr
Honestly, I would pay to see video-screen-share of how guys like TJ code.
eulalila
Genuinely inspirational that, looks like he’s now living in London with a hot Russian girlfriend working with sane, stable tools on small, developer focused products, and his homepage is still photography vs a bunch of shite little blog posts.

Difference between living to code and coding to live kids, take note.

sdwisely
I remember him from the Ruby community before that. Is there a correlation? probably not.

Life happens.

hazza1
https://www.quora.com/Has-TJ-Holowaychuk-been-as-prolific-in...

"my new goal is to live a better life. In the end open-source doesn’t pay the bills so it’s best to focus on other things if you can, or if you just enjoy the project then that’s cool."

malthejorgensen
This.

IMO he's still a "rockstar". It's just the Node and JS community that hypes everything disproportionally (they used to at least). The fact that he single-handedly built Apex (https://github.com/apex/apex) show that he's still prolific, and a programmer of note.

There's a similar story for Sindre Sorhus, who moved on from the JS community to Swift.

yeahitslikethat
It pays the bills for the business minded folks who sell it. Imagine any other industry of craftsman who worked countless hours building stuff that profited everyone but themselves while they complain about H1-B's taking their jobs.

They give their work away for free while complaining someone else is willing to work for even less.

And programmers are supposedly smart.

recurser
I’m a customer of his uptime service (https://apex.sh/ping/), and following up framework (https://up.docs.apex.sh/) with interest, but haven’t used it yet. Perhaps he is more focused on career and family, and less on open source? If so, good for him.
fpaboim
Apex up is nice, cool to know he's behind apex.