RE2 maintainer Paul Wankadia died

--- The univsrse is broken and so many people are upset about Junyer passing away at such an early age - he would be mortified at how many people loved him and his work and him being a decent human.

He spent so much time on making RE2 better (see, relevant here) And a lot of energy directing his rage towards people who absolutely deserved his contempt.

He and I would regularly message about some new idiocy - whether it was whatever the new stupidity from talentless folks who had been put in charge of Google, or just random stupid bullshit.

His passing at such a young age is still a shock. He was exactly the sort of person that made working at Google so much fun. He was snarky and cynical and funny, but (and he would hate to hear this) he was a good soul who actually gave a shit about the world and the folks he worked with.

Even after I left Google a few years ago we'd regularly chat on Whatsapp, either I'd share some absurdity, or he'd share some of the latest Google shitfuckery, or the other way around.

He managed to carve out a corner of Google where he was largely left alone to make small changes with huge impact. Some times they were complicated and deeply technical but he always got it done.

I'm sure his shade, wherever it is now, would be quite annoyed about everyone reminiscing about him. Tough. He was a real one.

One thing we always will remember him for was his ability to find new documents about some new idiotic Google project. (Google at one point put money into cold fusion, for some reason) He'd regularly post links to Google docs or internal websites about new projects to the internal IRC #sydney channel for us to mock.

For the longest time it was a mystery how he kept finding them all. It was because of the internal link shortener, go/

New project would set up a new go/secret-project-design link to a Google doc or the like.

Junyer would regularly check the internal data store behind go/ to look for new ones that might be interesting or fun to mock, and share them. He was a fan of Good Trouble.

Every time the fuckfaces (who are now running Google into the ground) did some bullshit that a talentless MBA brained fuck would do, he would get mad, and share screenshots of internal emails from some random MBA weasel.

When he was an SRE on Appengine and Grindr was a huge customer, he was one of the folks who pushed for a team shirt of Grindr SRE: Are you feeling lucky?

He was also a brilliant engineer who would go “well that seems like some bullshit” and just fix it.

Over the last few years as Google went from a fun place to work to a place run by and for talentless mediocre management consultants like Pichai, he was always in a state of extremely pissed off about it all.

When Google laid off almost all of the Python team, he was so very, very, very pissed off.

I'm going to step back a little and talk about #YesWithLove. For trash reasons, marriage equality in Australia was subject to a non binding postal vote, we called it the plebisurvey. All it did was to give license to knuckle dragging bigots to be hateful.

One Thursday evening during this I said on Twitter this absolutely is pissing me off, I am going to gift match $10K of donations to LGBTQI+ charities that help kids. With the help of the extremely good person Amy Coopes we launched it the next morning. Junyer messaged me shortly after we launched it to say “I'll match $10K as well, but don't want my name to be shared”.

Too bad, you're dead now and you can't stop me sharing that you did this. We managed to raise better part of $100k in a day.

I never asked, nor did I care to ask, why Junyer chose to say yep, this a good cause and I will help. He was extremely private about any of this, and I never thought to pry. He was that sort of person.

He was extremely in favour of doing things right. He was also the sort of person who would go “ok that's pretty awesome/funny” every time us on Crisis broke maps. Or the many and varied times Pokemon Go broke so much of Google.

I am happy to have been his friend, and I am extremely upset about his passing. As are so many people who knew him.

Seriously, his shade is curling up in a ball of awkward right now to see how many people are devastated and upset by his passing.

Go well, Junyer. You were a real one, and will be missed.