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  zachthewf
  Highly recommend the Wired story about Lee: https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline...Long but totally heartbreaking.
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  thelastgallon
  Discussed before:What happened to Lee? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22878136I remember this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22883548Saving 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.
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  hnp9j9qtda
  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.
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  polotics
  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=mZI2GQlNdJARIP Lee Holloway
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  tietjens
  I can't read this. The writing style is awful. Could be machine translated or just AI filling in from notes.
• anon
  undefined
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  quietraster
  had no idea anycast at cloudflare traced back to him. does part 2 get into what happened after
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  hyperhello
  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?
• 0xbadcafebee
  Strange that they claim Lee pioneered Anycast usage. Anycast was created when Lee was 2 years old. Afaik, CacheFly was the first big CDN to make Anycast edge networks back in 2002, along with EdgeCast in 2006, then Microsoft, Limelight, etc.The "Cell architecture" is also an old idea we used back in 2006. First install all your software on all your nodes. Then have an agent on the box poll a custom REST API endpoint that looks up the host in the CMDB/IMDB and generates a config file. That config file is stored on the box and used to inform a CM tool to start the services that box should be running. You run multiple different network and app services per box to maximize the hardware in use, so you don't have idle nodes wasting money, power and rack space (the redundancy is a bonus/efficiency gain)Sounds like a talented guy. Terrible to hear what happened to him.
• llm_nerd
  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.
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  cat-whisperer
  you have note.com . that's insane
• rimworld
  [dead]