Comment by shafte
7 years ago
I'm so glad this this article (unlike so many other representations of Jeff and Sanjay's work) does not overlook Sanjay's contributions.
I don't know what it is; maybe Sanjay is a weird (read: non-English) name, maybe it's that computing culture's obsession with lone hackers leaves no room for a partnership like Jeff and Sanjay's. Anyway, kudos to the New Yorker for not falling into that trap.
I think a big part of it is something the article touches on: Jeff is an extrovert, Sanjay is an introvert. Jeff is the much more visible of the two; the one who people are more likely to have heard speak personally or to have dealt with. It sounds like this is how they both prefer it, but it definitely means that Sanjay's contributions get passed over in the common discourse. I was also glad to see the article avoid that trap.
You mean like Steve and Woz? j/k :)
Ditto on the sentiment. I’m not a Googler but I’ve worked closely with a few, and Jeff was revered accordingly (along with the Chuck Norris-esque jokes). I’d honestly never heard Sanjay mentioned (and didn’t know who he was) until I read this article. I’m glad he was given his due and I’m glad to have learned about his contributions.
> (along with the Chuck Norris-esque jokes)
Funny thing, that was started by kentonv [0], who worked on open-sourcing protobufs [1], then CapnProto [2], then (with Jade Wang) Sandstorm [3]. He lurks around here :)
[0] https://plus.google.com/+KentonVarda/posts/TSDhe5CvaFe
[1] https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf
[2] https://capnproto.org
[3] https://sandstorm.io
Hello...
Indeed, I wrote the internal web site (built on a pre-release prototype of AppEngine!) that aggregated these jokes, and released it on April 1, 2007. I was not funny enough to come up with the jokes myself; I enlisted some friends to seed the site before "launch".
In retrospect, I regret that Jeff Dean Facts gave people the impression that Jeff is more notable than Sanjay. The only reason it was "Jeff Dean Facts" and not "Sanjay Ghemawat Facts" is because Jeff seemed "funnier". But I dunno, that might just be some form of subtle racism that I failed to recognize at the time. :(
PS. Your list doesn't include my current project, Cloudflare Workers... :) https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containe...
So much!
As a college student, it was so weird learning about Jeff Dean's meme status, and it wasn't until after joining Google and coming across things like the original protobuf design doc that I realized how significant Sanjay's contributions are.