alt Hacker NewsHey! I created Jeff Dean Facts! Not the jokes themselves, but the site that collected them.
It was in 2008 I think (give or take a year, can't remember). I worked at Google at the time. Chunk Norris Facts was a popular Internet meme (which I think later faded when he came out as MAGA, but I digress...). A colleague (who wishes to remain anonymous) thought the idea of Jeff Dean Facts would be funny, and April 1st was coming up.
At the time, there was a team working on an experimental web app hosting platform code named Prometheus -- it was later released as App Engine. Using an early, internal build I put together a web site where people could submit "facts" about Jeff Dean, rate each other's facts on a five-star scale, and see the top-rated facts. Everything was anonymous. I had a few coworkers who are funnier than me populate some initial facts.
I found a few bugs in Prometheus in the process, which the team rapidly fixed to meet my "launch date" of April 1st. :)
On the day, which I think was a Sunday, early in the morning, I sent an email to the company-wide "misc" mailing list (or maybe it was eng-misc?) from a fake email address (a google group alias with private membership), and got the mailing list moderator to approve it.
It only took Jeff an hour or two to hack his way through the back-end servers (using various internal-facing status pages, Borg logs, etc.) to figure out my identity.
But everyone enjoyed it!
My only regret is that I targeted the site specifically at Jeff and not Sanjay Ghemawat. Back then, Jeff & Sanjay did everything together, and were responsible for inventing a huge number of core technologies at Google (I have no idea to what extent they still work together today). The site was a joke, but I think it had the side effect of elevating Jeff above Sanjay, which is not what I intended. Really the only reason I targeted Jeff is because he's a bit easier to make fun of personality-wise, and because "Jeff Dean Facts" sort of rolls off the tongue easier that "Sanjay Ghemawat Facts" -- but in retrospect this feels a little racist. :(
My personal favorite joke is: Jeff Dean puts his pants on one leg at a time, but if he had more than two legs, you'd see his approach is actually O(log n).
Replies
Hi Kenton! I was the recent grad you handed this web app off to after you built it, so I expanded Jeff Dean Facts so that anyone could create and rate facts about anyone at Google :). There were a ton of team in-jokes added before I stopped working on it - O(5k) IIRC! :)
This web app was also how I learned the pain of maintaining a live web service with a lot of ever-changing dependencies. How I sighed when the AppEngine version changed and I had to fix things again...
I handed it off again before I left Google but I have no memory of who that was to unfortunately :(.
I’m no expert, but I certainly wouldn’t call that racism. Bias, absolutely. And it’s important that we acknowledge our biases.
But in a more literal sense, the chance of your joke landing was likely higher due to the things that you stated and due to your audience and their biases.
I don’t see your joke as being in any way harmful towards Sanjay aside from potential knock on effects of Jeff Dean being more popular. But if you try to calculate every second and third order consequence of everything that you do, let alone any moments of humor you might have.. Well, you might as well lock yourself in a cell now.
Ah, I knew I recognized the friendship between Jeff and Sanjay -- they were the subject of a New Yorker article in 2018:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...
EDIT: And HN at the time:
Ah but it’s not racist. It can’t be. Jeff and Sanjay have never had race conditions.
:)
Re Jeff and Sanjay - they recently were on Dwarkesh together I believe - so it looks like the partnership is still going strong. Regarding Dean over Ghemawat facts, the vibe from the convo is that Sanjay is the (very slightly) junior partner of the two, or at least he lets Jeff do more of the talking. Very, very nice vibes hearing them talk, and their war stories are clearly nuts.
> I have no idea to what extent they still work together today
They just got their own (unofficial) Lego set: https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2006581022666928415
> but in retrospect this feels a little racist. :(
It’s not racist. It’s just to do with name length.
"Why do you pick on Protocol Buffers so much?
Because it’s easy to pick on myself. :)"
Damn!
> My only regret is that I targeted the site specifically at Jeff and not Sanjay Ghemawat.
Later version of the site was generalized so that people can submit facts for any user. I think Jeff Dean still has all the funniest fact though.
> Jeff & Sanjay did everything together,
my nonexpert impression is jeff keeps much more of a public profile. hence the natural celebrity goes to him. was this not true way back in the day?
That meme started in early 2007 I believe. I started in 2006 and was in ZRH by 2008 and it was around long before I made that move.
Your job is unfinished :-)
You still have to create a Youtube channel for Jeff Dean/Sanjay Ghemawat (slayers of code!) like "Entertaining AI" did for "Chuck Norris" - https://www.youtube.com/@Entertaining_AI
Maybe both in the URL?
You could add a meme generator that's like the Django docs tutorial with the internet web-poll
Hi Kenton! No worries at all. I tend to be quieter than Jeff anyway (less public speaking etc.) and I am happy to not have a dedicated website. :-). -Sanjay