
Goodbye Joyent - aberoham
https://zinascii.com/2020/goodbye-joyent.html
======
jtuple
Sad news. But, not unexpected given the state of Joyent in recent years.

Really happy Z got a chance to work at Joyent though, even if it was only for
a few years.

For most of us ex-Basho (ie. Riak) engineers, Basho was a career highlight.
We've mostly moved on to better paying, more stable jobs, but lost the magic /
passion / joy that we had at Basho.

Ryan's the exception. I imagine he's loved his time at Joyent as much, if not
more, than Basho.

Here's hoping lightning strikes for a third time and Ryan lands somewhere
great after his winter break.

------
vanderZwan
> _I read a lot of code too, which wasn’t always easy, but sometimes I was
> lucky enough to find myself treated to one of Robert’s epic block
> comments[0]._

He wasn't exaggerating, that is an epic, beautiful, I would even say
_humbling_ block comment to read. It's completely outside of my regular
knowledge domain but that is not at all required to appreciate it.

[0] [https://github.com/joyent/illumos-
joyent/blob/dff0473c792fc5...](https://github.com/joyent/illumos-
joyent/blob/dff0473c792fc5c3ef7c3d862e557fe201a5d671/usr/src/uts/common/io/mac/mac_sched.c#L28-L967)

~~~
techslave
it’s a horrible comment. OTOH it’s world class documentation. obviously i’m
not comparing myself, but i often find myself the only one at my $JOB that
documents things at similar level. 99% of the time because i’m touching code i
don’t understand and need to understand it first. writing the doco is the way
i do it.

software would be soooo much better if we lived in a world where a)
engineering practice demanded devs document this well, and b) the majority of
devs had the skill to write so well. market pressure however demands faster
delivery times, and who cares about the tech debt.

------
tgtweak
What a joy to work with Bryan et al. Probably the best paid education you
could imagine.

Is Samsung doing nothing with joyent? Seems they could and should be competing
heavily in the server space if not the public cloud itself more meaningfully
than they seem to be today.

~~~
zeveb
> What a joy to work with Bryan et al.

Presumably not for Ben Noordhuis: [https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-
pronoun](https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun)

That blog post is why I resolved never to do business with Bryan Cantrill or
Joyent. I don't know if it influenced others to do likewise, but I can't
imagine that it actually helped the company succeed.

~~~
appleflaxen
But the entire point of the post you linked is that they don't work together.

~~~
nosequel
It sounds to me like the parent was on Ben's side and he wanted to keep all
the gendered pronouns in place.

------
qubex
I had to look up ‘SmartOS’ and ‘OmniOS’ because I had no idea what they are.

NOTE: This isn’t meant as an insult; it’s just that often people use terms as
if they were universally known. He had hyperlinks to some of the more obscure
items on the list but not the key items.

~~~
pushpop
I’m surprised. They were massive names in the OS scene until recently. Their
lineage can be traced back to Solaris and share many of the cool technologies
that Sun developers pioneered. So much so that for the first few years of
SmartOS, Linux felt like a hobbyist platform in comparison due to its lack of
dtrace, containerisations, ZFS, etc.

Linux has come a long way since, which is a large part of the reason why
SmartOS has become less relevant. The latter being a great shame because
competition breeds innovation and we are losing a lot of interesting
interesting Unixes from the public consciousness.

Edit: oh come on. I post this and it almost immediately gets negative karma
despite being both factual and informative. A perfect example of the rife
abuse of peer moderation on this site. I honestly don’t think I’ll bother
wasting my time on here any more.

~~~
toyg
The downvotes might be for the slightly bombastic tone. SmartOs and IllumOS
never felt “massive” to me, particularly compared to Linux. They might have
had some nice tooling inherited from Solaris, but they were never particularly
appealing for people who were not invested in the Solaris ecosystem - which
had already been effectively wiped out by Linux by the time IllumOS and
SmartOs appeared.

~~~
qubex
Or maybe the downvotes are related to the rather fanatic behaviour of some
readers of this thread – I got downvoted for mentioning I hadn’t heard of
those OSes, only to be then voted up; and downvoted elsewhere when I told
somebody to cheer up because they had been downvoted for essentially making
the same comment. It’s pretty frustrating, to be honest: “try to cheer
somebody up, get punished for it” isn’t the way things are meant to be.

------
trevhead
This is a beautiful goodbye. I don’t recognize most of the names but now I
want to.

------
gexla
Always interesting to hear the name Joyent again. The company has had quite
the colorful history. Starting from a productivity suite I never understood to
then moving into hosting to eventually becoming a major cloud computing
provider.

I used some of their Solaris VM's and never had a problem getting eased in.
Learning how to get around in one seemed to be just a bit more work than
learning a different Linux distro.

The company was fun to be a customer of even if I did lose my Mixed Grill,
later upgraded to the 3 Martini Lunch. I imagine even more fun to work for.

------
patkai
It is the sign of terrible incompetence to downsize people like him. If you
ever get hold of people with this much competence then find a clever project
for them, or create a new subsidiary.

~~~
user5994461
The company is doing poorly and it's a miracle it's not closed yet. Better not
judge a dying company for laying off (all) its staff.

~~~
patkai
No way I am judging the company, meaning Joyent. But Samsung Electronics owns
them, so what I expect is they realise they sit on a goldmine of talent, and
if Joyent products are not doing well then they reinvest that talent in
something else.

------
wmf
I guess Oxide will be picking up some more people.

------
mberning
The good ol RIF. Must have some fortune 500 alums working in HR or the C
suite. Too bad they didn’t offer VJRP or SERO.

~~~
techslave
well it is samsung... one of the largest companies in the world

------
mathattack
Interesting that he throws MongoDB under the bus. I’ve heard a lot of
negativity about them lately.

~~~
techslave
lately? MDB has always been awful. Then again i did work at the largest MDB
deployment (per MDB themselves) so saw all the problems.

~~~
mathattack
Technical problems or commercial?

------
bsg75
> I feel like I was just starting to ease into my all-night rager as an
> illumos kernel developer, only to have 5-0 break it up before I could jump
> off the roof into the pool.

I was surprised at how appropriate and familiar this phrasing felt.

------
webo
Very very few developers these days get to work on such low level stack. It
just sounds very technically challenging yet fun. Wish him good luck to find
something related in his next venture.

------
anon102010
The mongoDB comment rings true at least from the past

Never heard of the OS mentioned

~~~
qubex
> Never heard of the OS mentioned

I hope for your sake that this admission won’t cause you to be brutally
downvoted too. Here’s a pre-emptive +1 ;)

~~~
qubex
Downvoted because I dared to point out that I had been downvoted elsewhere.

What is wrong with the denizens here nowadays??

~~~
spdionis
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good,
> and it makes boring reading.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
qubex
“Please” being the operative term in “ _please don’t_ – to be perfectly frank,
if I see people behaving fanatically, I’m going to mention it. Elsewhere
others beyond myself were downvoted for simply mentioning that they’d never
heard of the OSes mentioned before. Is that deserving of downvoting? No. Am I
going to stay quiet about it? Again, no. Do I care if I will be downvoted to
hell and below? For the third time, no. I consider the behaviour of others to
be far more rude – and such behaviour is on the rise. If it is hidden behind a
rule that has the side-effect of making it impossible to call such behaviour
out, I’m going to disregard that rule – as I am doing now.

------
emmanueloga_
re: Design. This blog uses the Triplicate font, which is the only font I ever
purchased if memory serves :-) [1]

1:
[https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html](https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html)

------
sillysaurusx
It’s kind of risky to have programmers who feel so passionately opinionated
about the software that should power a business.

It’s doubly tricky, because most companies pay lip service to passion. But
like a chef that cares a bit too much about which cookware you use, it
sometimes hinders the goal of serving 100 customers at noon.

I respect that they’ve created their entire networking stack from the ground
up. Few can claim the same. But objectively, the less eyeballs on a piece of
code, the more risk. What will the company do if they’re hit by a bus?

I’m not sure that companies should be measured in terms of “what if a dev
suddenly goes away,” since creative work isn’t interchangeable like gears in a
machine (nor would we want it to be). But it seems at least _partly_ relevant.

The tradeoff is that if you use unpopular software, like lisp, you can often
gain more leverage in specific situations. HN’s software is the most flexible
codebase I’ve ever seen, but few have ever studied it deeply. Viaweb used
those principles to dominate the competition at a time when everybody was
writing websites in C. But are those days gone?

It might be an asset for a startup to use obscure software, so it’s definitely
worth honing the skillset. I’m just not sure it’s a good idea to feel so
strongly about business in particular. It has a way of burning you.

~~~
zelly
> The tradeoff is that if you use unpopular software, like lisp, you can often
> gain more leverage in specific situations. HN’s software is the most
> flexible codebase I’ve ever seen, but few have ever studied it deeply.
> Viaweb used those principles to dominate the competition at a time when
> everybody was writing websites in C. But are those days gone?

In Paul Graham's days, Lisp was not as unpopular as it is today. It was more
like choosing to use Ruby in 2020. On its way out but still in the public
consciousness.

~~~
sillysaurusx
Hmm. I think Viaweb was the first web application (or at least, no one's
disputed that claim) and they kept their choice to use lisp a secret until
acquisition. If someone else was using lisp to make websites, it seems like
they must have independently rediscovered the idea.

It was started in 1995 and acquired in 1998, so that wasn't a very long time
for lisp to come into the public consciousness. It seems like at best it was
considered an AI research language.

~~~
zelly
No one was making web applications with anything. The consumer-facing web was
still in its infancy.

> It was started in 1995 and acquired in 1998, so that wasn't a very long time
> for lisp to come into the public consciousness

Lisp was the only game in town other than C for multiple decades. Absolutely
everyone learned it in university. It was the main garbage collected scripting
language, like Python today.

~~~
pjmlp
During the 80's and 90's that place belongs to Basic dialects, not Lisp.

And when Viaweb came to be, there was also ML, Smalltalk, Perl and Tcl to
choose from.

This if we focus only on the context of UNIX, because otherwise the language
spectrum gets even wider.

