Sad news. But, not unexpected given the state of Joyent in recent years.<p>Really happy Z got a chance to work at Joyent though, even if it was only for a few years.<p>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.<p>Ryan's the exception. I imagine he's loved his time at Joyent as much, if not more, than Basho.<p>Here's hoping lightning strikes for a third time and Ryan lands somewhere great after his winter break.
> <i>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].</i><p>He wasn't exaggerating, that is an epic, beautiful, I would even say <i>humbling</i> block comment to read. It's completely outside of my regular knowledge domain but that is not at all required to appreciate it.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent/blob/dff0473c792fc5c3ef7c3d862e557fe201a5d671/usr/src/uts/common/io/mac/mac_sched.c#L28-L967" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent/blob/dff0473c792fc5...</a>
What a joy to work with Bryan et al. Probably the best paid education you could imagine.<p>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.
I had to look up ‘SmartOS’ and ‘OmniOS’ because I had no idea what they are.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
> 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.<p>I was surprised at how appropriate and familiar this phrasing felt.
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.
re: Design. This blog uses the Triplicate font, which is the only font I ever purchased if memory serves :-) [1]<p>1: <a href="https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html" rel="nofollow">https://practicaltypography.com/triplicate.html</a>
It’s kind of risky to have programmers who feel so passionately opinionated about the software that should power a business.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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 <i>partly</i> relevant.<p>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?<p>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.