Adios Jeff Dean

It is the end of an era. Jeff Dean is leav­ing Google. Long live Demis Hassabis.

I have long looked up to Jeff Dean as a bea­con of en­gi­neer­ing ex­cel­lence. Hearing that he will no longer be a dri­ving force at Google is some­what sad­den­ing, but I am quite ex­cited to see what he does at Discovery Loop.

In cel­e­bra­tion, I sug­gest you read through this com­piled list of Chuck Norris-style Jeff Dean facts.

Here are a few, to give you an idea of Jeff Dean’s rep­u­ta­tion:

• Jeff Dean com­piles and runs his code be­fore sub­mit­ting, but only to check for com­piler and CPU bugs.
• Jeff Dean in­vented BigTable be­cause his re­sume was too big to fit any­where else.
• Jeff Dean does­n’t use ECC mem­ory. He an­tic­i­pates cos­mic rays and uses them to im­prove per­for­mance.

If you are in­ter­ested in a real-life mon­tage of Jeff Dean’s nu­mer­ous ac­com­plish­ments at Google over the years, I sug­gest you listed to Acquired’s won­der­ful episodes about the com­pany. It’s a long lis­ten, but trust me, it’s worth it.

• Episode 1
• Episode 2
• Episode 3