I knew CrazyBob for over 20 years. We met at JavaOne and at the time he was still a consultant living in St Louis. Bob was always the life of the party with a grin like a Cheshire cat. Eventually he got a great job at Google working on the core APIs for Android and created the very lightweight Guice dependency injection framework. We shared a distaste for both Spring and J2EE by that point. At Square he started the CashApp and created a strong engineering culture. Even though he was a college dropout he was one of the best algorithm guys I have met (e.g. https://www.beust.com/weblog/coding-challenge-wrap-up/). The closest we ever got to working together was when I was talking with Twitter about an acquisition of my startup and was getting advice from him he immediately put us into the process at Square. I think their pair programming interview style was the most fun I have had interviewing. We ultimately went with Twitter but I would have done as well going with Square.

Our families would hang out together when we lived close and I feel sick just thinking about his children right now.