I'm sure he didn't build any of those alone, and as a "leader" and a product person he probably didn't do much of the "building".
Seems like he was mostly in an advisory role for Drupal, Docker and MongoDB, he didn't exactly build them.
Perhaps a more accurate wording is:
"You may know me from helping to build the Go Language, Docker, MongoDB, and Drupal & creating Hugo, Cobra and spf13-vim"
Congratulations on your new role. Two Sigma seems super-exciting.
I’ve also read your code. I enjoy it and learned a lot more of go that way.
Whatever. Thanks for helping make Go so much fun for me. I look for excuses to write CLIs with Cobra/Viper. They’re of a very few set of libraries I look forward to using.
I use Hugo for much more than it was intended for.
Heck, I wrote a CLI with Cobra around Hugo and a simple theme for my personal note taking and todo management. I was annoyed with other markdown note tools and DIY was a fun waste of time :).
Having worked on all these should be good enough you don't need to embellish and constantly overstate and lie about your contributions. Let other people talk about how great you are.
He pushed hugo and viper in 2013-2014: https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/commits/v0.7, viper: https://github.com/spf13/viper/commit/98be071
Steve is a very accomplished programmer, with what hugo / viper became in the go ecosystem by itself. In my view, the projects also jumpstarted a lot of new users who were trying out golang who weren't sold on it yet. I didn't really notice his leadership or advisory roles until now, that's just icing on the cake.
Thanks for your contributions, Steve!
Edit: If it's really big ecosystem, _indirect_ contributions also matter. e.g. in python, even if you're not writing CPython patches or PEPs, community based projects do a lot to shape best practices and even bubble up into standard library.
"I work for Google" has become one. "I'm a Googler" just has me pivot and walk away.
Another infamous one, "I work at the White House."
This is true about any successful institution in general. I noticed it first with Universities but it applies to jobs as well.
W O W, really ?
His LinkedIn says he started at MongoDB in 2011. The first commit to Hugo was in 2013, a full two years later. Your story doesn't add up at all.
He left in the middle of 2014. He was checked out for a long time. I'd say that timeline adds up pretty nicely.
So while Steve would like take credit for Mongo's enterprise adoption he barely had anything to do with it. Not with the Server, not with Cloud, not with Sales, Marketing or Education.
We all contribute to poop. Our level of contribution to said poop does not diminish that, in fact, we all work on poop so we’re all in the same poop boat. Take it easy on each other, and reserve the bullshit calling for those who really earn it, like the folks who initially built the poop you’re claiming by cleverly offshoring their minimum maturity on the financial and sweat equity of every early adopter. Like, say, for example, for no particular reason, my team at the exact time you’re arguing about.
It’s fine, though, I get it, that’s valley capital, fake it until you make it, give us ops teams ulcers, we make goodish money. Just weird to see resentment over who can claim MongoDB success with that kind of perspective is all. Particularly since the success at the time was all lazy developer mindshare (no disrespect, I’m lazy too), and the technical weaknesses started a few ten-year roadmaps that are now in the market and obsolete MongoDB.
Are you agreeing with the "whistleblower" or not?
While it may be read as some sort of Jealous screed, I have observed similar behaviors from people who fall under this collection of traits. People that might at first be seen as having accomplished a lot, but on further examination, its maybe a few things, and the rest of the things are generally exaggerations.
To a certain extent I understand the need to self promote if one wants to continue to work on OSS but without corporate sponsorship/funding.
In terms of proliferating Go I think that statement is fair. spf13 is like brand name in open source.
I recall years back on GitHub, spf13 was like a name you were guaranteed to come across if you were sinking your teeth into Go. I ended up using cast / viper: https://github.com/tony/vcsync/commit/a76681b. (Not that I'm anything special at golang)
No doubt his contributions did in fact help that process, but as I read it, the claim asserts him as the driver of that process, which he was not.
Did you not read the post?
The post is full of evidence of the things that he did or the team that he led did that drove Go's growth.
He definitely was a major contributor to Go's widespread adoption both as an OSS contributor and as a project leader.
Generally, I'm with you. In this case, I'm only half with you (the phrasing around Go and Docker could use some humility), but he really did build Hugo and Cobra. He contributed quite a bit to the Go ecosystem, he's not just some product person taking credit for work other people actually did.
Linus created Linux, but 1000s of people built it.
This guy isn't claiming to have built any of these alone, just claiming that these projects are where you'd recognize him from.