[brendangregg]

Thanks. There was a time when many observability products were adding latency heat maps, and at one conference expo floor there were three companies with latency heat maps on their screen at the same time, pitching them as a flagship feature. If I walked near them they'd start trying to explain them to me, and I never figured out an appropriate response. If I said "hey, great to see you added them, I invented these back at Sun" I'd get funny looks.

I think it's a small world, and everything is software, so the chance you'll bump into someone who wrote software you are using I think is pretty high. I was once trying to get my head around Andi Kleen's pmu-tools, and I had the github repo open in my browser on my laptop I was carrying, when the guy sitting next to me on a bus says he's Andi Kleen. (Ok, it was a bus taking Linux conference attendees to an event, not a random bus, but I still found it remarkable timing -- I was studying pmu-tools at that exact time!)

[FridayoLeary]

Still, it must be quite rewarding to know that everyone, no matter how big is using your tools. Before i knew anything about open source, i was somewhat surprised to see that even the giant that is Apple had open source licenses on their iPod. I assumed that apple had enough resources to develop all their own software, but no, they go just like everyone else and pick off-the-shelf software.

[bostonsre]

Thank you for sharing some of what you've learned with everyone in everything that you've published. I've been reading the latest addition of your systems performance book the past few weeks and it is amazing. You're work is pretty awe inspiring.

[bostonsre]

s/'re/r/g

[loup-vaillant]

> If I said "hey, great to see you added them, I invented these back at Sun" I'd get funny looks.

I don't understand. What kind of funny looks were they? Disbelief? Distrust? Fear of your mental health? Realization of having been lied to by their bosses (oops it wasn't really an internal tool)?

Also, what were the impact of those funny looks? How did they make you feel? Was there any longer term consequences of telling them you wrote the thing?

[brendangregg]

Disbelief and suspicion. And fear of my mental health I guess: What's wrong with this person?

Maybe I just don't look or dress or sound like what one would expect. But there's context here too: At the time it's when these things are flagship features and on the booth monitors, and the booth staff are explaining the virtues of these features to everyone they meet. They are making it a big deal of it at the time, so maybe that makes it even more unbelievable that the inventor would wander by at that moment.

Now imagine what would happen if companies had a thanks page along with the other boilerplate pages (contact us, about us) on their website. If you're making millions from a thing, thank the original person for that thing. (I put thanks pages at the end of my slide decks, it's not hard.) These interactions would go a lot better -- "my name is on your company website" -- and could lead to fruitful discussions and collaboration instead of weird looks.

[mijoharas]

Years back I was at a deep learning conference and was reading Andrej Karpathy's blog during one of the talks. Demis hassabis had come in slightly late and sat at the last free seat that happened to be next to me.

He leaned over, asked if I liked the blog, and (slightly proudly if I remember correctly) mentioned that deep mind had hired Andrej for an internship starting soon.