I don't know when I met Bob. It was just as he was joining Google, and like many others, we met at conferences and instantly hit it off (for entirely unclear reasons). He liked the BileBlog, and delighted in how immature and childish it was, with all the poo flinging and whatnot. He'd always egg me on to go further, say worse things, poke more fun at everyone.
Whenever we met up, Bob would drag me kick and screaming out of my comfort zone. Somehow, everything I did with Bob always seemed like a bad idea but always turned out to be memorable and wickedly fun. He was so enthusiastic for life, and his enthusiasm was infectious.
I remember talking to him when he got the Square CTO offer, and him giggling about how uniquely unqualified he felt but hey why not, he's crazybob so no matter what happens he'll have fun. He took me on a tour of the NYC office, and was bemused by how silly it was that he was supposed to be the adult in the room.
Somehow amidst all the fun, we still managed to find time to discuss all things Java, from the politics of the JCP to why Guice refused to support @PostConstruct to the clever hackery he figured out to get Guice to have useful error messages when bindings failed.
I'll miss you Bob, you were a bright beacon of joy that inspired everyone around you.
I can one up you. I learned how to program in Oman in the 80's.
Most of what I learned was on a C64, initially basic but very quickly switched to assembly.
Coding involved waiting for 1-2 month old magazines arriving and painstakingly typing in all the code to eventually end up with a snake game or similar.
In terms of actual games, there were two avenues:
- Mail order from the UK (takes roughly 2-3 months for it to be shipped and arrive). I still very fondly remember the rush of adrenalin when my dad would say 'there's mail for you'.
- There was a Chinese antiques shop in Ruwi that had a back room with some Chinese enthusiast computing guy who sold games. He eventually got me hooked onto PCs (showed me a mindblowing 286 with CGA graphics which I graduated to after my C64, my parents refused to buy me an Amiga as they thought I'd just use it for gaming).
I ended up becoming quite good at cracking software protection (pretty easy when all you had to do is look through 64kb of ram, you could literally read the whole thing in a few hours), and setting up a dodgy business selling games to everyone at school.
I always felt very out of place though as few people shared the passion I had for this stuff. Moving to the UK after high school for A levels/university and discovering like minded people on BBSs and then the internet in the early 90's was pretty life changing. Suddenly I was not alone, it turns out there's a huge swathe of people that have the exact same passions!
It's crazy how much motivation and passion you can get when information is so scarce, and you just want to play games :D I don't regret what I had to go through either.
Whenever we met up, Bob would drag me kick and screaming out of my comfort zone. Somehow, everything I did with Bob always seemed like a bad idea but always turned out to be memorable and wickedly fun. He was so enthusiastic for life, and his enthusiasm was infectious.
I remember talking to him when he got the Square CTO offer, and him giggling about how uniquely unqualified he felt but hey why not, he's crazybob so no matter what happens he'll have fun. He took me on a tour of the NYC office, and was bemused by how silly it was that he was supposed to be the adult in the room.
Somehow amidst all the fun, we still managed to find time to discuss all things Java, from the politics of the JCP to why Guice refused to support @PostConstruct to the clever hackery he figured out to get Guice to have useful error messages when bindings failed.
I'll miss you Bob, you were a bright beacon of joy that inspired everyone around you.