I posted this hours ago and then stepped away. The story captures so much about the Lee I knew so well. I'll add one piece of praise for Lee's early architecture of Cloudflare.
Everything was controlled by a single Postgres database that made very heavy use of stored procedures, that called other procedures, that called others. It was one giant program inside the database. It took me a while to comprehend what he'd done but it was really great. The database ran everything and all those functions made sure that audit logs were kept, that the calls were allowed for the user ID being passed in, and some of these procedures made external calls to APIs including getting things like SSL certificates.
It was a magnificent monolith inside a database.
I worked on the periphery of the database (it was truly Lee's domain) and he'd tell me what output to expect or API to create and I'd code to his spec. and we'd just hook it up.
If any single artefact represents what he did at Cloudflare, it's that database. And he used to code it on a laptop we called "The Beast" because it was so crazily heavy and overloaded with memory etc. that he'd carry around a mini, test Cloudflare wherever he went.
Thanks for reposting that. Re-reading my own words made me well up a bit at the memories of that time and working with him. And the final technical meeting I had with him where I couldn't understand why he was being oddly stubborn about an API definition. Looking back it was all part of his illness.
Repeating myself here but anyone who has not yet watched the whole 2024 series of Prof. Sapolsky "Human Behavioural Biology" lectures series... really should.
Good, if brief, intro, however right at the outset this tripped me up-
"Cloudflare's rapid growth as a cloud service is due in part to its many unique technologies. Technologies like Anycast and same-IP access are just a few examples"
Anycast has been around and in use since 1989 (finally becoming an RFC in 1993), and was widely used long before Cloudflare. On the CDN side some alternatives did it differently -- Akamai used DNS mapping, for instance, which has detriments and benefits -- but many large enterprises and services used Anycast long before.
Just not sure why they call that a "unique technology", and to a casual reader it implies invention.
Not sure what "same-IP access" is, though maybe they're just describing Anycast?
Cloudflare's rapid growth as a cloud service was overwhelmingly a business model thing, as is usually the case. Everyone could put it in front of their site for free, in the vast majority of cases, completely obliterated overpriced and overwrought competitors like Akamai. Technical excellence came later, but if they pursued a traditional business model in the space they would have been just another CDN.
Anycast is hardly unique to Cloudflare. It's been around since the late 80s (before BGP), and has been used commercially for much longer than Cloudflare has existed. In fact, the root nameservers have done anycast for about 25 years or so and they're much more critical infrastructure.
Discussed before:
What happened to Lee? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22878136
I remember this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22883548
Saving a click:
I posted this hours ago and then stepped away. The story captures so much about the Lee I knew so well. I'll add one piece of praise for Lee's early architecture of Cloudflare.
Everything was controlled by a single Postgres database that made very heavy use of stored procedures, that called other procedures, that called others. It was one giant program inside the database. It took me a while to comprehend what he'd done but it was really great. The database ran everything and all those functions made sure that audit logs were kept, that the calls were allowed for the user ID being passed in, and some of these procedures made external calls to APIs including getting things like SSL certificates.
It was a magnificent monolith inside a database.
I worked on the periphery of the database (it was truly Lee's domain) and he'd tell me what output to expect or API to create and I'd code to his spec. and we'd just hook it up.
If any single artefact represents what he did at Cloudflare, it's that database. And he used to code it on a laptop we called "The Beast" because it was so crazily heavy and overloaded with memory etc. that he'd carry around a mini, test Cloudflare wherever he went.
Thanks for reposting that. Re-reading my own words made me well up a bit at the memories of that time and working with him. And the final technical meeting I had with him where I couldn't understand why he was being oddly stubborn about an API definition. Looking back it was all part of his illness.
Highly recommend the Wired story about Lee: https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline...
Long but totally heartbreaking.
Here’s an internet archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20221024031807/https://www.wired...
Hmm, the Wired link is not behind a paywall.
Yea it is
seconding the wired piece — worth noting he's not dead, that's the awful part. FTD, in a care facility, personality gone years before the body.
Frontotemporal dementia
Repeating myself here but anyone who has not yet watched the whole 2024 series of Prof. Sapolsky "Human Behavioural Biology" lectures series... really should.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZI2GQlNdJA
RIP Lee Holloway
> RIP Lee Holloway
Did I miss something about Lee Holloway?
I can't read this. The writing style is awful. Could be machine translated or just AI filling in from notes.
It's machine translated. You get the original Japanese if you remove the query param: https://note.com/masakazu_urabe/n/n7815f5b64fab
Good, if brief, intro, however right at the outset this tripped me up-
"Cloudflare's rapid growth as a cloud service is due in part to its many unique technologies. Technologies like Anycast and same-IP access are just a few examples"
Anycast has been around and in use since 1989 (finally becoming an RFC in 1993), and was widely used long before Cloudflare. On the CDN side some alternatives did it differently -- Akamai used DNS mapping, for instance, which has detriments and benefits -- but many large enterprises and services used Anycast long before.
Just not sure why they call that a "unique technology", and to a casual reader it implies invention.
Not sure what "same-IP access" is, though maybe they're just describing Anycast?
Cloudflare's rapid growth as a cloud service was overwhelmingly a business model thing, as is usually the case. Everyone could put it in front of their site for free, in the vast majority of cases, completely obliterated overpriced and overwrought competitors like Akamai. Technical excellence came later, but if they pursued a traditional business model in the space they would have been just another CDN.
had no idea anycast at cloudflare traced back to him. does part 2 get into what happened after
Anycast is hardly unique to Cloudflare. It's been around since the late 80s (before BGP), and has been used commercially for much longer than Cloudflare has existed. In fact, the root nameservers have done anycast for about 25 years or so and they're much more critical infrastructure.
What is with the bold sections? Is this just AI or are you trying to make sure I didn’t fall asleep reading the bland plaintext?
Stylistic choice / tradition; it's a (machine?) translated version of a Japanese text.
American comics have bolded words too.
you have note.com . that's insane
They don't. Note is a blogging platform like Medium, but more popular in Japan.