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Remembering Bob Lee

2090 points by aEJ04Izw5HYm ↗ HN
I want to draw attention to Bob Lee, a well-respected technologist and prototype hacker, always curious and sharing lots of interesting technical developments. He was a great role model for how Engineers should be respected in an executive capacity as he advanced his career from 'Software' to 'Product'. His efforts contributed to technology used by millions. What happened to him is tragic and wrong; he deserved better. Thank you, I'll miss you 'crazybob'.

Please share your stories featuring Bob Lee, who I'm sure would like to be remembered for his contributions rather than as a victim of this unfortunate awful event.

234 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] thread
hintymad
What a tragedy. I remember Bob’s code that generates certain numbers: https://www.beust.com/weblog/coding-challenge/. Bob’s code is in Java, yet uses clever backtracking techniques to achieve the best performance among many solutions in all kinds of languanges.
somekyle
Hah! I was just remembering the exact same thing. His fingerprints are all over my development as a professional Java programmer.
scythe
I was curious about this, but it looks like the links to crazybob.org now 404.

It seems to me like the trick would be to find a way to generate, in order, the numbers you can't print, then you just print the gaps between them.

bootsygw
https://web.archive.org/web/20080912181335/crazybob.org/Beus...
hintymad
Huh, it seems Bob further optimized his code. The one I remember used the similar approach, but employed a doubly-linked list for backtracking. The pleasant surprise that I got from his code was that recursion plus a linked list still beat those "faster" languages, a classical example of optimizing algorithms first, as beautifully argued in Steven Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual
swagv1
Put it on his epitaph
irrational
Why was he called crazybob?
MrDresden
According to footnote 121 in Chet Haase's book 'Androids' Bob had used this nickname since highschool and even used it as his corporate email address.

Does not answer where it originally came from, but he seems to have enjoyed the nickname.

aboodman
I read that it originated from his waterpolo days.
strangemonad
can confirm. It's a nickname he earned as a teen playing water polo.
kevinb9n
I half expected we would find it on his long form birth certificate.
anon7725
Didn’t know him, but saw his name all over Google’s core Java libraries. Rest in peace.
throwaway5959
I met him a couple times at user group meetings for mobile dev. Always very patient and helpful. RIP.
kasperni
Bob created Guice [1] and was involved in a number of JSR specifications. Bob also lead the initial development of Androids core libraries before moving on to the payment industry. He was a well known figure in the Java world. RIP.

[1] https://github.com/google/guice

KingOfCoders
Someone I didn't know IRL but who has been with me since the earliest Java days. He was so influential in Java thinking like Dependency Injection, loved 'Guice'. RIP.

From his old blog:

"I'm a stay-at-home dad. I used to be the CTO of Square. I also created the Jolt award-winning Guice framework and led the core library development for Android."

I found some of my interactions with him in the comment section of his blog from nearly 20 years ago :'(

snodnipper
Bob was an incredible guy - we've lost wonderful tech leader _but_ I am so terribly sorry that his family have to go through this
cs02rm0
I was hugely inspired by his Java stuff too. Guice and I seem to recall then seeing his name on Guava and Android code too.

Felt very guilty about 10 years ago when I won a competition (not sure how competitive it really was, but still) to meet him and Josh Bloch for pizza and Java talk. I think it was because they were attending a conference, but I wasn't able to get there. Still have the email from him, but never did get the chance to meet him. His career seemed to go from something that I could relate to, to stratospheric from there. Absolutely deservedly so from everything I could see.

I've roamed around places that have a fairly sketchy reputation but being stabbed at that age seems unfathomable.

Terrible loss, tragic for his family.

iradik
So sad. I met Bob once at an interview at Square in 2012 for the final interview. I believe he was the inventor of Google’s guice dependency injection library and the dagger library. I bombed the interview. I liked him anyway. RIP.
dannyr
If I remember correctly, Bob Lee worked on the Google Android team too.
cpurdy
Yes. He wrote big chunks of the original Davlik libs.
beastman82
Exact same experience in 2010. He was internet famous for guice, CTO of Square and former lead of Android library dev. Asked about my flight and was generally just friendly.

Before that I had even cold-emailed him about something related to the Square CC reader and he responded.

Anyway I didn't get the job either, but it was impossible not to like him in my very limited experience. Terribly tragic.

veeti
The extent and popularity of Square libraries in Android development is crazy. Whenever you download an app I think there's a pretty good chance some of Bob's code is in there.
oh_sigh
Oh, yup. I knew him as "crazy bob" through all his guice comments, and didn't connect that these were the same Bob Lees until your comment.
throw_m239339
Some great contributions he did. RIP, life is simply unfair.
ynx
Precisely my experience with him as well.
kevinb9n
Just to fill in some detail, Dagger was originally by jessewilson, but Bob was certainly highly involved. They were working together a lot then.
timcobb
wow Rest In Peace Bob. You were an inspiration.
bengalister
I remember him from a tech video on theserverside.com, I thinkg it was on guice and dependency injection back in the 2005-2010 period. He was all smiles, energetic and inspiring. Sad news.
ZitchDog
I am so sorry to hear this, my heart goes out to Bob’s family. I had the pleasure of meeting Bob a few times while doing Android dev, he always went to Strange Loop. He was kind, smart, and funny. He was one of those CTOs that still loved to hack and tinker. The world will miss you, crazybob.
digitalsanctum
Shocked to hear about this senseless loss. I didn't know Bob personally but was a big inspiration to me as a Java developer early in my career. My thoughts and prayers to his family and friends.
pizlonator
Rip crazybob. :-(

What a great guy. Can’t say enough good things about him.

elbenshira
For some reason I was thinking about Bob two days ago, ten years since I last interacted with him. I was just an intern at Square and he had just joined as CTO. But I remember how patient and inquisitive he was with me. Rest in peace, Bob.
matttproud
Bob was a nice guy. We had an overlapping tenure at Google in the 2000s. He was one of the original authors of the Guice dependency injection framework: https://github.com/google/guice. When I was earning Java readability at Google, I was fortunate to have had him assigned as a reviewer. Having the review work so smoothly alleviated a lot of the imposter syndrome I felt at the time. I felt like a million bucks afterwards. The compassion and humility he brought to the table made a world of difference.

His murder represents a huge loss; he left a very positive impression on me.

shadowgovt
I've never met a dependency injection framework I liked, but I hated Guice least. Credit to the minds who conceived it.
fnikacevic
One of my old teams also liked to mispronounce it as "Gucci" for extra style
dboreham
Dependency injection as an external framework is an antipattern for me. Ends up creating more problems than it solves.
BurningFrog
Ah... I wondered where I recognized the `crazybob` name from.

Guice was the one Google code that surprised me with how good it was while I was there.

julienchastang
I am sad to read this, this AM. I remember Bob Lee from when he was a Java evangelist / technologist / blogger / author. I believe he was from the Midwest (St. Louis?). He co-authored "Bitter EJB", I believe. Terrible loss.
kevinb9n
(yes, your facts are correct here)
aaa_aaa
More than 15 years ago I was an avid follower of him on software development. He was an excellent developer and a good man. This is very very sad, condolences to his family.
formvoltron
Same here. I wanted to improve my Java code... to improve organization & readability. I found Guice and watched his videos. Came to really enjoy his talks and would seek them out on topics I wasn't so interested in.. just interested in his style of presentation. I guess I was charmed by him.

Such a tragic loss for the programmer community and of course... his family. Deepest condolences.

kayge
His story about becoming the Code Red Vigilante (writing a program to help stop the spread of the Code Red worm) is a fun flash back to the early 2000s hacking scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ElYs3hXSkI
datalus
bruh the screen savers is such a blast from the past and peak late 90s/early 00s tech. It's crazy to think Martin Sargent co-hosted with Digg's co-founder Kevin Rose quite a bit on that show.
ethbr0
At this point, there's probably a whole generation on HN that isn't familiar with Digg, much less anything before.
mbernstein
I met Bob at StrangeLoop in (I think) 2014. He was there with Joshua Bloch and I entered a coding challenge and got to have dinner with them at a local pizza place. He was such an amazingly nice, gracious, intelligent, and giving person. He'll be immensely missed by the whole community.
Scubabear68
I remember fondly interacting with him quite a bit 20 years ago early (?) in his "crazy bob" phase on theserverside.com, and the epic flamewars around Java backend frameworks and app servers. Quite a shock to hear of his death.
obiefernandez
Those were the days!
KingOfCoders
Did some googling today, sorry for my comment! (But mine was one of the nicer ones ;-)

"Obie is one of those Ruby developers with no programming experience"

http://blog.crazybob.org/2007/09/gavin-king-on-activerecord....

Scubabear68
The tech has changed, but the Flamewars were just as hot 2 decades ago! Bob was never afraid to have an opinion.

A bit sad to see all those deadlinks in the comments though. From what I recall sites like JRoller were captured by the Way Back machine, but images seem to have been lost. At least they were for my blog at the time.

KingOfCoders
Yes, JRoller, TheServerSide, I remember when they launched, I think I got paid for writing a review or something, "lost like tears in the rain".
hobr
I met him around the same time and we did the conference circuit together for a fair few years.

I vividly remember being sucked into his craziness more than a few times in my formative years!

A fun, welcoming guy and an incredible technologist.

tomandrews88
> being sucked into his craziness

Just curious what was he like in terms of the craziness? Partying? Skydiving?

hobr
My experience was the partying. He seemed to have boundless energy for it and it was infectious.

I remember arriving at a conference with serious jet lag and just wanting to sleep. I grabbed dinner with a few of the other speakers and Bob's energy was enough to turn dinner into drinks and drinks into skipping the whole night's sleep.

springrod
Certainly partying. But also unpredictable (good unpredictable) and creative in unexpected ways. Good crazy.
kumarm
No one in java community can forget Crazybob. He was one of the engineers that showed path to many on how to move from being engineer to executive. RIP.
echelon
I first met Crazy Bob when I was onboarding as a junior engineer. He spent a good half hour answering my questions about how to go about work, grow into my role, and explore the things that interested me.

He was the busy CTO, built up the core service container (which I later maintained), but he spent time giving me advice and encouraging me. He was an instrumental figure in getting rid of my imposter syndrome at my first big role.

We met several times after that, and he was always kind.

Thank you for caring, Bob. You made an impact in my career and you're gone much too soon. Your code, fingerprints, and even Crazy Bob moniker are powering billions of dollars of transactions and will be there perhaps longer than all of us.

staticautomatic
Bob was an acquaintance of mine. A crazy dude and a good man. It’s hard to describe the feeling of seeing his face show up on Apple news with this headline.