@vivilinsv: Google has many star executives, but in the world of engineers, the one truly written into “legend” is @JeffDean Jeff Dean! Silicon Valley once had a whole set of jokes about him: “Jeff Dean’s resume only needs to list the things he hasn’t done - because that page is shorter.” …

Google has many star executives, but in the world of engineers, the one truly written into “legend” is @JeffDean, Jeff Dean!

A whole set of jokes about him once circulated in Silicon Valley:

“Jeff Dean’s resume only needs to list the things he hasn’t done — because that page is shorter.”

“Before Jeff Dean writes code, the code optimizes itself first, so as not to disappoint him.”

These are, of course, Chuck Norris-style jokes, but they also reflect his almost legendary status in the computing world.

Jeff Dean joined Google in 1999. At the time, the company had only about 25 people, and the office was still located above a shop in Palo Alto.

He helped build Google’s early search, indexing, advertising, and large-scale computing systems, and later drove a series of key technologies including MapReduce, Bigtable, Spanner, TensorFlow, TPU, and Google Brain.

Much of the invisible underlying infrastructure behind the search, cloud computing, big data, and deep learning world we know today bears his imprint.

But the most moving story about Jeff Dean isn’t just how one genius writes code — it’s how two geniuses worked together for more than twenty years, forged a deep friendship, and changed the world together.

In 2018, The New Yorker published a long feature about the friendship between Jeff Dean and @Sanjay_Ghemawat (yes, Jeff’s new startup is with his old friend Sanjay of many years!). The title was:

The Friendship That Made Google Huge

The two have completely different personalities.

Jeff is outgoing and energetic, fond of proposing bold new ideas and quickly writing astonishing prototypes; Sanjay is quiet and reserved, skilled at turning an idea into a system that can run stably for many years.

Jeff is responsible for seeing the distant horizon; Sanjay is responsible for making sure the bridge to that horizon doesn’t collapse.

They often don’t even work at their own computers separately, but sit side by side at the same machine doing pair programming: one types on the keyboard, while the other observes, corrects, and thinks.

In 2000, Google’s search indexing system nearly collapsed. The web was still growing rapidly, but the results users searched for were already five months behind.

Jeff and Sanjay worked together to find the problem: as server fleets scaled up, hardware errors that were once extremely rare became inevitable, and even cosmic rays could flip a 0 in a chip to a 1.

They didn’t just fix that one failure; they thought further: how could tens of thousands of cheap computers, any of which could fail at any moment, work together like one reliable supercomputer?

The Google File System, MapReduce, and Bigtable that followed not only supported Google’s expansion, but also profoundly influenced the cloud computing and big data industries that came after.

The New Yorker called the two “Binary Stars.”

In Google’s engineering level system at the time, most people’s careers topped out at Level 5 or Level 6; Jeff and Sanjay were described as the company’s first — and at that time only — Level 11 engineers.

But Jeff Dean’s life isn’t just about technology.

His father researched tropical diseases, and his mother was a medical anthropologist. At age 13, he went with his parents to refugee camps in Somalia; in high school, he helped develop epidemiological software that was later used by public health workers around the world.

This may also explain why, after leaving Google, he didn’t choose to build another chatbot or ad optimization tool, but instead set his new company’s mission as: using AI to accelerate science and engineering, solving important human problems in medicine, health, clean energy, and water.

27 years ago, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat joined a startup with only a few dozen people and turned it into the Google of today.

27 years later, 58-year-old Jeff Dean decided to start again.

And Sanjay is still sitting right beside him.

This is truly moving. A true soulmate is nothing more than this — like Buffett and Charlie Munger, lifelong kindred spirits, making life worth living!

PS. The photo is from @JeffDean’s tweet — you can see Jeff and his brilliant friends, and regardless of age or achievement, there is still a simple, innocent light in their eyes that makes you feel there is still hope and warmth in this world!