The Vanished Genius: Lee Holloway, the Architect of Cloudflare's Technology
A Biography of Lee Holloway, the Architect of Cloudflare's Technology (Part 1)
Lee Holloway co-founded Cloudflare and built its core technologies, including Anycast and the Cell architecture, enabling the company to handle over 10% of internet traffic. But in 2016, he was forced out after a mysterious personality change. This biography reveals the tragic cause: frontotemporal dementia, diagnosed at age 36, which had been silently altering his behavior for years.
Matthew recalled feeling a "tremendous anxiety, like losing a best friend" as he watched his co-founder change right before his eyes.
- zachthewf
Highly recommend the Wired story about Lee: https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline...
Long but totally heartbreaking.
- hnp9j9qtda
seconding the wired piece — worth noting he's not dead, that's the awful part. FTD, in a care facility, personality gone years before the body.
- thelastgallon
Discussed before:
What happened to Lee? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22878136
I remember this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22883548
Saving a click:
I posted this hours ago and then stepped away. The story captures so much about the Lee I knew so well. I'll add one piece of praise for Lee's early architecture of Cloudflare.
Everything was controlled by a single Postgres database that made very heavy use of stored procedures, that called other procedures, that called others. It was one giant program inside the database. It took me a while to comprehend what he'd done but it was really great. The database ran everything and all those functions made sure that audit logs were kept, that the calls were allowed for the user ID being passed in, and some of these procedures made external calls to APIs including getting things like SSL certificates.
It was a magnificent monolith inside a database.
I worked on the periphery of the database (it was truly Lee's domain) and he'd tell me what output to expect or API to create and I'd code to his spec. and we'd just hook it up.
If any single artefact represents what he did at Cloudflare, it's that database. And he used to code it on a laptop we called "The Beast" because it was so crazily heavy and overloaded with memory etc. that he'd carry around a mini, test Cloudflare wherever he went.