
An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google - jgrahamc
https://bradfitz.com/2020/01/27/leaving-google
======
agar
It's been great fun to follow bradfitz's career.

I first learned of him from a post on Slashdot about a cool remote controlled
door hack in a college dorm. His roommate posted and basically said, "this guy
is brilliant, it's just the tip of the iceberg - he posts what he's working on
at bradfitz.com, check it out." This was in...1998? 1999?

Seeing him start to post a daily journal, get frustrated, then write
LiveJournal was fascinating. Posts on the problems he faced scaling it, open
discussions on caching architecture (leading to a LiveJournal user suggesting
he investigate slab allocation technique that led to memcached), identity
(leading to OpenID), moderation, etc. were always illuminating. Moving to Go
because he understood what problems needed solving just made sense. Rewriting
Google's downloader because it sucked? Well, of course he would.

I don't know Brad other than occasional comments/responses from the early
livejournal days (user number ~10K, after procrastinating actually joining for
too long), but it's clear that he draws inspiration from overcoming
roadblocks.

Taken in that context, leaving Google is completely understandable - having a
trillion dollar organization there to remove roadblocks would subvert a key
driver for his personal innovation and inspiration.

Good for him that he recognized this and is taking the leap into the unknown.
Can't wait to see what he comes up with next, but I'm guessing the real
treasures will be found in the process and not the final outcome.

~~~
bradfitz
Ha, I forgot about that door opener! I found the page:
[https://bradfitz.com/misc/projects/remotedoor/](https://bradfitz.com/misc/projects/remotedoor/)

~~~
RobertRoberts
How did you deal with people criticizing your masking tape construction? This
has been a bane for me since I can remember.

I love prototyping but hate the instant terrible feedback. People often look
at the construction instead of the results and/or can't/won't imagine it a
first step or how awesome a final product it can turn into.

~~~
reaperducer
Do things for yourself, not for others.

Don't even look at the comments. Turn them off if you can. They're not paying
you, so you are under no obligation to please them.

On the other hand, if you know that you're going to get undesired feedback,
why post your stuff in public in the first place? You don't get the glory
without the risk. Before the internet, people did things because they liked
to, and because they enjoyed them. They didn't need the praise of a thousand
random strangers to feel good about their accomplishments.

~~~
RobertRoberts
Something you didn't address, unwarranted critisim or just plain mean comments
can just hurt or drain you emotionally. It can rob you of desire to work or
entirely demotivate you from your original goal.

While you may argue "deal with it", and rightly so in most circumstances, but
then you are only addressing an issue of grit. I have plenty of grit in _some_
areas of my life, but not _all_ areas of my life.

And, sometimes the negativity is unexpected like when you are just showing
something you find cool or neat that you built. (ie, I have never once put my
code out in public nor sought praise for it)

Everyone has a limit where they can't take any more negative feedback on
something.

And with prototyping I have found it better to wait to show the client until
it's in an "appealing" state. Hence my question about masking tape prototype.
(my favorite material to build with as a kid because it was plentiful and easy
to rip, but was unappealing visually)

~~~
incompatible
Criticism doesn't bother me. It will generally come into three categories: 1.
Insults and trolling with no valid content: this tells me nothing I didn't
know already, that there are morons in the world 2. Valid criticisms, but
things that I already know about and either can't do anything about or where I
decided it wasn't worth the effort: again nothing I didn't already know 3.
Valid criticisms that I hadn't thought of: these contain new information and
are potentially very useful.

The masking tape criticism would come into category 2.

~~~
RobertRoberts
"That sucks" is valid criticism for many people, as well as "who would want
that?" and "why did you waste your time?".

Your categories are all logical responses, what about the immediate emotional
effects of the responses?

If you have never experienced an immediate emotional response from criticism I
count you extremely lucky that you don't have to face it. But for those of us
that do, we are looking for answer to the emotional side of things.

Is there some technique you have used to blunt the emotions and look at them
only logically?

~~~
matz1
>what about the immediate emotional effects of the responses?

Our brain/body is good at adapting so you simply ignore it or rather embrace
the pain, yes it will be painful in the beginning but the more you are exposed
to it the better it will be over time.

~~~
RobertRoberts
I suspected someone may say something like this. Is jumping in the deep end
the only real answer to issues of fear or emotional turmoil? (ie, get back on
the horse...)

I don't disagree with you, I was just hoping there may be something else to
consider.

~~~
incompatible
I am not immune to misguided emotional responses, but I believe I can
generally recognize them for what they are, and ignore them. Especially when
criticism comes from somebody you care about, like a partner, the emotional
response is the strongest. But this is also the time to analyse what they are
saying rationally and establish whether there's any truth in it. The emotional
response seems to me to be to mindlessly defend.

------
crystaldev
Good luck to Brad. It sounds like the last twelve years of his life were pure
Google, it's a big change.

> I don't want to get stuck in a comfortable rut. (And Google certainly is
> comfortable, except for open floor plans.)

It's oddly comforting that even programmers of Brad's caliber are forced to
cope with open offices. When can this fad end.

~~~
SamWhited
> When can this fad end

It's not a fad, businesses aren't doing this just because it's trendy and cool
and they think people will like it, they're doing it because it saves them a
fortune and they care more about their bottom line than their employees well
being.

~~~
VRay
It saves a fortune, but the companies are spending a fortune on their
employees' salary and benefits too

I think we're talking the difference between $300/month on open desk space vs
$1000/month on an office. It's a lot of money and it adds up, but these people
are costing the company a total of $10k-$40k a month

My theory is that open space is extremely helpful to certain types of people,
and those traits coincidentally overlap with the people calling the shots at a
lot of companies. Sociable upper managerial-types probably value being able to
collaborate more easily in open space more than being able to concentrate in
private offices.

Plus it's harder to get away with blatantly goofing off if anyone can look
over and see your screen at any time, but I dunno how big a deal that is when
people are setting their own hours and picking the projects they're working
on. At least in my case, I don't give a crap if my teammates have Facebook and
Netflix onscreen at all times so long as they're getting their jobs done

~~~
staristari
> Sociable upper managerial-types probably value being able to collaborate
> more easily in open space more than being able to concentrate in private
> offices.

This is the opposite of my experience. One thing that shocked me about a move
to an open plan office after a life with offices was how stifling to
discussion.

It's so disruptive to have a conversation at someone's workspace, that to
discuss anything nontrivial (or even slightly sensitive) all participants go
somewhere else. This greater cost subtly means that people don't really
discuss as much.

When people do, it's more often in formal meetings (though of course people
can go find a whiteboard together for a chat here and there). These meetings
tend to fill their timeslots whether they need to or not, a known problem with
meetings.

Random, "What have you been working on" do not rise to the point of happening
as often, since chitchat at someone's desk is disruptive. Obviously this still
happens sometimes at people's desks, as well as in shared areas, between
activities, etc., but it's decreased. A culture of more regular 1:1s tries to
help make up for this, I think, but the formal nature of scheduled 1:1s makes
it hard to have the same organic discussions.

Even fairly mid-level management (and certainly upper management) and the
large open-plan office company I currently work for claims conference rooms
24/7\. This is clearly not about the ability to concentrate, but about the
increased ability to collaborate.

~~~
hinkley
And the hits just keep coming.

Some people are much better at thinking on their feet and out loud (I'm one of
them). Ideas are fragile, and if you're trying to verbalize, for the first
time, why something bugs you or how you think you fix a problem, and there's a
bunch of fast-talkers around you they're going to kill your idea before they
even get a chance.

I used to meet with these people privately, sort out what really bugged them,
poke at their idea and come up with a compromise they'd still accept, then I'd
go into meetings and try to out-talk the other fast-talkers.

Now you get one shot a day to do that, maybe, if we're both going out to
lunch, going together, and don't bring the wrong people along.

I've worried sometimes that my soft skills were a little lacking. But I'm
finding over time that my soft skills were actually pretty great, they just
needed doors.

------
chrissnell
I wonder if Brad has any idea how many lives he's affected.

At some point in 2013, I was a Linux sysadmin with 20 years of work under my
belt and rapidly burning out, seeing the DevOps movement approach and feeling
outmoded. I couldn't code. I saw a post here on HN about Brad's rewriting of
Google's download system in Go and was intrigued. That night, almost out of a
job and feeling like I had nothing left to lose, I sat down and started to
learn Go. Hoping to write a control system for a high altitude balloon, I
started writing a little every night after work. Soon, I attended The first
Gophercon and really fell in love.

From there, doors started opening for me. I left the sysadmin job and got a
job as a DevOps engineer. Wrote more and more Go. Better jobs and better pay
followed. Job interviews became something to look forward to, not fear.

Anyway, it was Brad's blog entry that inspired me and totally changed my life.
Things are amazing today. Thanks, Brad.

~~~
harryf
I remember this giant slide deck he presented at OSCON back in 2004 (guess)
about scaling LiveJournal with MySQL, memcached etc. IIRC it was the first
real “template” for how to scaling on an open source stack, and it massively
benefitted the team and company I was working for at the time.

Edit: this looks like one of the versions of that slide deck -
[http://www.danga.com/words/2004_lisa/lisa04.pdf](http://www.danga.com/words/2004_lisa/lisa04.pdf)

------
mynegation
Reading through his itemized list saw "Met Googler wife", which reminds me:
Brad created LiveJournal where I met my wife and many new friends. Thank you
for that, Brad! I have been watching your work on LJ, memcached, Camlistore
..err I mean Perkeep. You are an inspiration and I will be excited to see what
you will invent next!

------
Matt_Cutts
Thanks for all the things you did. The Android jank stuff made a big
impression on me--you made the value so clear with your work.

And also thanks for the rants when something wasn't up to par. I'm thinking
about [https://bgr.com/2015/02/18/google-nest-smoke-alarm-
video/](https://bgr.com/2015/02/18/google-nest-smoke-alarm-video/) , which has
only grown more hilarious to me over time.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
P.S. If you're looking for some interesting chaos to revitalize your life,
have you considered doing a tour of public service? :)

~~~
bradfitz
I did talk to the USDS folk some time ago in DC but I'm not really good with
patience or bureaucracy so not sure how well I'd do.

------
skmurphy
He turns 40 on February 5 (at least according to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Fitzpatrick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Fitzpatrick)
). I wonder if that was a factor in his decision. He could predict his path at
Google and wants to chart his own course again.

from his update:

"When I first joined Google it was a chaotic first couple years while I
learned Google's internal codebase, build system, a bunch of new languages,
Borg, Bigtable, etc. Then I joined Android it was fun/learning chaos again. Go
was the same when I joined and it was a new, fast-moving experiment. Now Go is
very popular, stable and, while there's a lot to do, things--often necessarily
--move pretty slowly. Moving slowly is fine, and hyper-specializing in small
corners of Go makes sense at scale (few percent improvements add up!), but I
want to build something new again.

I don't want to get stuck in a comfortable rut. (And Google certainly is
comfortable, except for open floor plans.) What next?

TBA. But building something new."

------
mxuribe
Congrats to you @bradfitz , and thank you for your numerous and massive
contributions!

If i may be so bold as to suggest areas where you might want to peek at for
your future attention...

* Maybe, work on the __Dendrite __effort under the matrix.org project; we need more and more federated communications platforms. See[https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/dendrite/](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/dendrite/)

* Work on Go lang. implementations (or for that matter any other language/platform implementations) of __fediverse __servers, clients, platforms, etc...because we need more and more federated options for social networks. (Ok, maybe "need" is too string a term here.) There are existing options (mastodon, pleroma, etc.), but if I've learned anything, its that, diversity is essential.

* Work on __LineageOS __, or any other similar, viable __alternatives to android or ios __...because - sorry, no offense - we need more and more options than simply google and apple for mobile phones /devices (and with liberty, freedom of choice, and privacy in mind).

I hope i wasn't being too presumptuous, but figured I'd at least it a shot at
giving you ideas. Finally, I wish you the best of luck with your new
endeavors!!!

------
filmgirlcw
I first “met” Brad via LiveJournal in 2000 or 2001, when I was 17 or 18. I
wound up becoming friends with him and some of his mutual friends, even though
I lived across the country.

Every few years, I’ve found my life intersect with his. Through various jobs
(and even careers), he’s been a constant person in my online orbit. When I
moved to Seattle 2.5 years ago, it was fitting that Brad lives here too and
even more fitting that he knows many of my coworkers, albeit in a completely
different way.

Brad is one of the smartest people I’ve bet met and probably ever will meet.
LiveJournal was the basis — both in idea and in technology (memcached, oauth),
the basis for Facebook, WordPress, and Tumblr. I’ve long said he’s the most
important Web 2.0 pioneer most people have never heard of. He’s also a
fantastic person.

I for one can’t wait to see what he decides do do next and how he’ll next
change the world.

------
tribby
bradfitz’s career is inspirational because he has succeeded in prioritizing
curiosity. never would have guessed a perl guy who wrote memcached to solve
livejournal problems would move on to go - only to walk away for something
more interesting. can’t wait to see what comes next.

~~~
biomcgary
I've followed Brad Fitz over the years because I also started in Perl and
ended up in Go. His intellectual curiosity and interest in doing cool things
well shines through. He is a great example of the leader-by-example category.

~~~
markstos
Notable that the word "Perl" appears nowhere in his write up of technical
legacy.

He was once Chief Architect at Six Apart, developers of the Perl-based Movable
Type blogging platform which once rivaled Wordpress.

~~~
bradknowles
I remember Six Apart and Movable Type. I always wondered what happened to
them.

Thanks for helping make that connection for me!

~~~
rurban
It died when it had that huge, exploitable serialization bug, similar to those
other platform serialization bugs those times.

Other than it was fine, but personally I preferred my PHP frameworks, which
were just better. Not WordPress, WordPress survived it unfortunately.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Movable Type isn't dead, except in the sense that every self-hosted blogging
platform that isn't WordPress (and possibly Ghost) is dead. MT 7.1.3 was
released in November 2019.

------
disgruntledphd2
To me, the most surprising thing about this post was a) his low number of
managers, and b) his low number of desk changes.

In under half that time at another, comparable tech company I hit well over
half his number of desk changes.

~~~
eterm
Have I misunderstood what a desk is? 25 desk changes in 10 years is low?

Moving desk at least twice a year is low?

Where do you work so I never try to apply?

~~~
the_watcher
I had 4 desk changes and 2 managers in a 3 years FAANG career, and my sense
was that I was probably in the bottom 25%, primarily because two of the moves
were into entirely new buildings (desk movement usually happened to help teams
work near each other, so a new building meant you had space to expand).
Relative to the three other companies I've worked at for more than a few
months, I think FAANG had the second lowest desk moves/year (although, again,
my sense is that I was on the low end within FAANG).

------
choppaface
Another notable piece of Brad's work:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY&feature=youtu.be&t=266)

~~~
pnako
That was scarier than many horror movies. Maybe he should enter that in a
short movie competition.

------
NhanH
To Brad: What is your plan with regard to perkeep? My understanding is that it
is your 20% project, and seems like you are one of the main force keeping it
alive.

Just asking since I have multiple servers running it right now, and will need
to migrate if it is going to be abandoned.

~~~
bradfitz
See:

[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/perkeep/Kqvh2dJVmoo/9N4YXAuX...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/perkeep/Kqvh2dJVmoo/9N4YXAuXGgAJ)

I no longer pay Mathieu to work on it full time, and my time is tempered by
2.5 and 0.5 year old kids.

I still use it, but don't have time to add to it much. Others work on it a
bit. Mathieu and I did work on [https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-
cdp](https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp) just recently, to fix the Google
Photos importer. So it's still moving a bit. Others still work on it too.

I'll pick up my involvement again as kids get a bit older. (One is almost
potty trained and starting preschool soon! :))

We have no plans to abandon it.

~~~
abtinf
> I'll pick up my involvement again as kids get a bit older.

I thought this would be true for me, but it turned out the other way. The
chores of toddler care are slowly replaced as the kids become more verbal.
Playing a game or having a conversation with my kids now is enormously
pleasurable—to the point where I’ve become acutely aware of the time trade off
of other projects.

~~~
BLKNSLVR
Very true, and this can't be overstated!

Once kids get their own personalities you actually want to spend more time
with them, understanding and developing their interests.

In between work and kid sports (or music, or scouts or whatever else)
commitments the time the kids spend entertaining themselves is important
parental 'downtime' and personal projects often just have to wait, potentially
forever, depending on one's ambition and sleep requirements.

I now actively resist pulling many of the threads that interest me, just
because I know it'll be yet another half-complete mess that's fundamentally
less important than the development of the kids. Choose your side projects
wisely (Perkeep sounds like a wise one).

------
gfs
In my eyes, Brad is one of the proverbial 10X engineers. I think Google/Go was
lucky to land him and keep him around for this long. Best of luck in your next
step, Brad!

~~~
superpermutat0r
10x engineers make other 10x engineers, most of the time.

Just look at mathematicians and their mentors and people they mentored, famous
names everywhere!

It's not a coincidence.

~~~
kokx
I think selection bias is involved here quite a bit as well. The best people
in the field are more likely to take on pupils that they think are very good
as well. And those people probably also do some self-selection.

------
xyst
It’s amazing how this is the first time I have heard his name. Great people
basically disappear under the Google name.

~~~
nostrademons
It's interesting how fleeting software fame is. Perhaps that's just a special
case of how fleeting fame is.

Folks who came of age in the early 2000s certainly remember him - he founded
LiveJournal; wrote memcached, MogileFS, Gearman, and a bunch of other
prominent software packages; authored the first version of the OpenID spec
(which eventually became OAuth, which you see all over the web); and was one
of the early Go engineers. He's featured in Coders at Work.

Same with other tech luminaries from that time period: Jamie Zawinski (xemacs,
Netscape), Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek, StackOverflow, Trello), Paul Buchheit
(GMail, Friendfeed), Kent Beck (Extreme Programming), Ward Cunningham (XP,
WikiWikiWeb), et al. Don't hear about them much these days, and when one of
Kent Beck's more recent posts was featured on Hacker News people were like
"Who is this guy?"

~~~
chipotle_coyote
That's true; some of those folks just left the software industry, though, I
think, or are at or approaching retirement age.

Tangentially, it's still interesting -- and faintly depressing -- to me how
much I think LiveJournal got right about social media that its bigger
successors, well, don't, specifically related to privacy. LJ users had
comparatively _immense_ control over who could read and reply to posts.

This isn't to say that Twitter and Facebook don't get a lot of things right,
too, in terms of ease of posting, lack of friction, and (for both better and
worse) monetization, but I wish "granularity of acces control" had been a
lesson we'd carried forward.

In any case, I'll be curious to see where Brad ends up next.

~~~
nostrademons
When Google+ was under development in 2011, I remarked to my team "So, our
differentiator from Facebook is...basically everything that LiveJournal had in
2002?"

~~~
solarkraft
Circles were great! Google+ was among the least obnoxious social media
platforms I have experienced.

I think it could really have replaced all the fragmented around Google comment
forms, but it sure wasn't wise to force everyone on YouTube on it in such a
shitty way. I think that initial public outcry was a significant stop to its
velocity, yet it could have become moderately successful and very valuable
long-term to slowly integrate all of Google's services. Just so many parts of
the execution were questionable, including the mobile apps :\

Was the lack of a semi-immediate huge return the reason it was killed?

------
jedberg
> 5.5 hours of unused massage credits

That just seems like poor planning. If he knew he was leaving, he should have
scheduled a one hour session each week for the last five. :)

~~~
bradfitz
Indeed. I just forgot about them.

Also, turns out you can only have one outstanding reservation at a time (so I
can't have one all-day massage on my last day) and can't gift them to other
employees.

Oh well.

~~~
xiphias2
One thing that may cheer you up that although when I went back to Google, I
lost my options, but got back my massage credits :)

~~~
bradfitz
I would negotiate my GSUs back before I'd negotiate my massage credits. :)

------
nemo1618
Brad's influence on Go has been huge, especially wrt HTTP and HTTP2 in the
standard library. Slightly sad to see him leaving the team, but I'm excited to
see what he's working on next!

------
mdonahoe
"Little bored."

Can some talented writer please make a book called "Boredom At Work" that
compiles essays from people who quit due to boredom and then went on to do
great things?

~~~
bblough
That's a great idea! I would read the heck out of that.

------
cousin_it
Livejournal was the most fun social network I ever used. The focus on
moderately long texts rather than tweets/photos/videos, the one-way friending
system where you could add anyone to your reading list, and the strict
chronological ordering of the reading list were a winning combination. I
wonder what's the best such network existing today?

~~~
fanf2
[https://www.dreamwidth.org](https://www.dreamwidth.org) is LJ's successor

------
fyp
> 12 years, 5 months at Google

> many Google-internal CLs ("change lists" == commits == PRs)

> 3,064 Android CLs

> 10,787 Go CLs

This is at least an average of 3 commits a day (4 if he didn't work weekends).
How is that possible?

~~~
asdkhadsj
Commit count can vary a lot, perhaps? I know I commit far more than my
coworkers, but that does not reflect the LOC or "amount" of work. I just
visualize and chunk things up into commits more frequently.

~~~
holtalanm
my commit count is really low. i usually squash my commits before submitting a
PR.

that was the workflow at my previous place of work, so it just became my
workflow habitually.

~~~
google234123
This is not good practice in many circumstances. Large commits are very hard
for others to review.

------
ohwel2l
Very unique video of Brad and Andrew hacking an HTTP/2 client:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG-
UaBJXZ80](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG-UaBJXZ80). Andrew is also a great
human!

~~~
bradfitz
Andrew is one of my favorite humans! :)

------
raphlinus
Congrats, and best of luck on the new adventure.

One of my favorite bradfitz moments (and there were a number) was when I was
on the spam and abuse team, and the two of us were talking about chat
protocols, likely in the context of preventing spam, and he brought up XMPP. I
asked what that was (I had known it simply as "Jabber") and he looked at me in
wonderment that I didn't know that.

Livejournal, memcached, go, those are three hugely impactful things. Let the
number continue to increase!

------
gtirloni
It's a bit surprising to me that a great engineer can't be properly managed to
find interesting work in a company as huge as Google. I'd expect all layers of
management to be engaged in finding exciting challenges for Brad.

~~~
bradfitz
I think there would've been more of that had I asked for it or given a more
explicit warning.

I also moved from San Francisco to Seattle recently without really asking for
permission, and while there's a lot to do in Seattle, there's much more to do
in the Bay Area.

------
codegeek
You don't know me Brad but I am curious as to what's next for someone like you
(if you are willing to share). What motivates you for your next thing ? I
doubt it is just money but would love to know more.

------
mkadlec
"And Google certainly is comfortable, except for open floor plans" \- Great
line...

Good luck BradFitz!

------
llegnaf
Is Brad moving to Cloudflare given that this was posted by their CTO? Best of
luck Brad, always been a fan of your stuff!

~~~
jgrahamc
That would be news to me.

~~~
llegnaf
Always fun to speculate! I was connecting the dots of Go being widely adopted
at Cloudflare ... or something like that.

------
cyanbane
"Rewrote memcached (which I wrote pre-Google) in Google C++"

What is diff in 'Google C++' and 'C++'?

~~~
yencabulator
[https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html](https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html)

~~~
cyanbane
Ahh, so just style changes. TY

~~~
Laremere
More than that, the guide limits C++ usage to a safer subset of features.

~~~
erik_seaberg
C++ relies heavily on RAII. Exceptions are safer than broken instances from
failed constructors.

~~~
kragen
Google C++ doesn't allow using exceptions and therefore requires broken
instances from failed constructors.

~~~
saalweachter
Google C++ tends towards the convention of constructors that do only cursory
initialization to a sane but non-functional state, things that almost-always
succeed (and assert on failure), with the "real" initialization pushed to an
Init() or Start() function.

~~~
bruckie
Not these days, although that was true 8-9 years ago.

The preferred pattern now is to use factory functions that can return either a
fully-initialized object or an error.

------
astockwell
Godspeed, Brad has always been an inspiration for maintaining your humanity in
the immense machine. Excited to see what's next.

------
gtycomb
Favourties: > Worked on most of the Go standard library. Primary author of
net/http, database/sql, os/exec, Go's build/test CI system, etc.

Thank you. Software poetry they are to me.

And this one: > met Googler wife

Best wishes, Brad Fitz

------
ceocoder
I've been using software built by bradfitz for a very very long time -
LiveJournal where I attempted to blog during a period of.. let's just say
misguided rebellion against nothing in particular, memcached at my first job
out of school, and Go - I introduced it at my current job and vast majority of
our code base is now in Go. And there was that one time he reviewed my tiny CL
in Go.

Thanks for everything, best wishes for your new venture!

------
psankar
Been following your work for a long time now (memcached, livejournal,
camlistore/perkeep, etc.) but could not contribute to any of your work sadly
(other life priorities, sigh).

Met you in a Golang conf and talked about some client libraries for Go for
AWS. You were really helpful and motivating.

Best of luck to whatever you are building. On a personal level, I hope someday
I get to work with you in some project :)

------
hadrien01
25 desk locations in 12 years. Is changing desk every 6 months normal at
Google?

~~~
MrHamdulay
Unfortunately pretty common.

~~~
moralestapia
Any insight into why? I didn't know about this. (Haven't changed my desk ever
while working somewhere)

~~~
adregan
I've moved desks 6 times (between 2 buildings and 5 floors) in under 3 years.
I guess when a company is growing rapidly, you've got to shuffle people
around.

------
andrewplu
Thanks for everything you've done for Go Brad. Many things that I've built
would not have been possible without your contributions.

------
gigatexal
Is it telling about something wrong at Google if he’s leaving partly because
he’s bored? I mean there nothing cool in terms of things he could do there?

------
xrd
Be honest, you are going back to Perl, right? Perl6 will be so amazing when
you get involved again. See you at the PDX Perl meetups very soon?

~~~
bradfitz
You mean Raku, right? :)

~~~
xrd
Look, I've moved on from Perl so I don't need to know what it is called now.

(Edit: it's a joke. But I accept the down votes)

~~~
yawaramin
Fortran. (To paraphrase C.A.R. Hoare)

------
alain_gilbert
I'm curious, nobody seems to talk about Go2 in this thread.

I haven't hear about it for a very long time. Is it still something the team
was working on ?

And if yes, does the fact that Brad is leaving going to impact a lot on the
development ?

------
jorblumesea
> I don't want to get stuck in a comfortable rut.

This is my biggest worry and fear, so easy to just rest and vest. It's hard,
as humans, to do something new and risky. Props to you, Brad.

------
jcrubino
Brad I have learned much from your Go presentations and learning about your
path to becoming a Googler. Thanks!

... But if you are responsible for today's downage just say it. : )

------
kristianp
> Little bored. Not learning as much as I used to.

I think that's pretty common around 40 years old. The career just doesn't feel
as challenging as it used to.

------
danyork
Best wishes, Brad! Thanks for all you've done from the LiveJournal days on
through Go and everything. Looking forward to learning what comes next!

------
Dolores12
I remember you from livejournal's times. It's pretty impressive path from blog
to golang. Good luck on your new journeys!

------
pcj-github
Question for Brad (if you have time): other than Go, what Google projects that
became open source deserve honorable mention?

~~~
bradfitz
gVisor is pretty amazing and has enabled a lot internally. For a long time it
wasn't clear we were ever going to open source it as opposed to keeping it as
secret sauce for ourselves. I'm happy we did release it.

I'm very curious what happens to Fuchsia. It's very ambitious and might be
amazing, but in a weird state right now where it's open source but they don't
talk about it (or document it) much.

------
yawaramin
Congrats on taking the next step! Are you already working on something under
wraps right now? Or taking a well-earned break?

------
i-j
Likewise, good luck Brad!

Many probably already looking forward to what your "building something new"
will be! :)

------
yingw787
@bradfitz congratulations on a long, productive tenure at Google! Looking
forward to what you do next!

------
winrid
Good luck! Just left my job after almost seven years this past Friday. Man is
it hard.

------
djhworld
Good luck Brad, you were one of the reasons I got into Go in the first place!

------
alexellisuk
Thank you for Golang and for defending its simplicity.

------
solarkraft
How will this affect work on Perkeep? :-)

------
weishigoname
good luck to Brad, working in a startup environment may have more fun and
motivation.

------
sidcool
Congrats Brad. You rock

------
mmhsieh
sad to see him go

------
kkotak
Just curious why "Leaving Google" posts is put on the front page by HN.

~~~
fooblat
It's not just anyone, it's Brad Fitzpatrick. He created LiveJournal and is the
author of many free software projects such as memcached, PubSubHubbub, OpenID,
gearman, and Perkeep.

~~~
sundarurfriend
Huh, throughout this thread I had no spark of recognition even after the LJ
mentions, but reading his name in full somehow triggered my memory bank.

------
mychael
> met Googler wife

Makes me happy to see this still happening despite the current climate.

~~~
hadiz
Probably was before Tinder, even.

~~~
bradfitz
I met her in Munich 5 years ago while I was en route from San Francisco to
Brussels for FOSDEM. (I stopped in the Munich Google office for a bit on that
trip.)

