If you read Gregg's Health FAQ be sure not to miss the "You seem oddly calm about this." section. You could otherwise get a wrong impression.
Life really was not kind to him, but he doesn't seem to have let it get in his way.
I've really accomplished my life goals – my family is well looked after, I've had a very rewarding career in Tech; particularly the last 15 years working with some amazing people at the World WIde Web Consortium. If there's ever a good time to go out, it's now. Anything else would just be gravy on top."
The only goals that really matter. Love, family and professional and personal joy.
I hope one day to have the courage to face my own demise with such calm, and the gratitude to appreciate what I've been given, and to find it 'enough.' I still have a long way to go to even come close to either goal.
Or, from another lens:
My father was an awesome man, and incredible to his family-- and he went on an incredible personal journey with IBM doing cool stuff that he thought was meaningful as part of that, bringing back stories to his family.
(Like making one of the earliest computerized large industrial control system, to automate a cement plant... and the shenanigans that he and his work friends got up to during this time. Or how much he liked the 650, and what an interesting puzzle it was to try and make a fast program. Or indeed, even the things he failed at: at their programming school he was not good with the accounting special-purpose plugboard machines).
Or-- from mine: I won the startup lottery at 22 and "retired" but that did not last long. I am not a happy person without purposeful work. And I am a better person in my family by virtue of that purposeful work.
That is obviously true.
Which means that as a society, we utterly fail at this. By design, some asshole above you who is trying to optimize your franchise's or department's KPIs will inevitably take every bit of joy you might derive from work, and optimize it away.
If you are happy with your work, anytime the hiring market weakens, that's a great reason to squeeze more out of you/lower your relative pay. If you are passionate about doing something, that's a great reason to make you a worse offer than they would to someone who doesn't care. If you aren't hitting some indicator that's believed to be incredibly important by someone six corporate levels above you, and your line manager is just a powerless drone with no real agency of their own, prepare to get written up.
An individual can walk away from any particular bad situation there - but the overwhelming majority of jobs across the economy are not ones that will avoid all of this. By definition, most people working will not be able to 'enjoy their work'.
You can win a round of musical chairs, but the players as a whole can't.
I've found having a good job that I enjoy is a significant factor in me being emotionally available to my family. Work doesn't have to be a combative relationship between employee and employer.
Though I do think it's a bit easier to find outside of the tech industry. You can still be doing software development, just don't do it at a software company. Especially any place that has at any time claimed they are trying to "change the world".
It's not about drinking the corporate kool-aid, but about taking pride in what you've put in the world (even potentially as a hobby), having a sense of craftsmanship, or even maintaining a certain work ethic.
Even the "making money" part can be tied to a very deep sense of providing for your loved ones, and a sense of personal responsibility.
> "I have been unbelievably lucky in life, and particularly in my relationship with Rebecca."
(i strongly agree with this, fwiw, based on the data collected about regrets when people approach death [1]; also, we should take the life lessons from someone who has passed as a gift, with value to help us live more full lives with the time we have left)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Top_Five_Regrets_of_the_Dy...
And back to Gregg - he's personally been an inspiration to me. Who would I be to question his life choices, but I for one am grateful for the path he did choose to take.
I’ve chosen to focus on my family at the expense of career progression and additional income. I don’t think my work would be more than half a sentence in my obituary. But I like what I do for work and I get a type of satisfaction from it that’s different from what I get in my personal life. I’m happy with that.
None of the millions of people throughout history who have enjoyed a creative outlet for their cognitive abilities also involve professional work should be proud or happy about the things they made because someone might think they're sad, misguided, exploited fools?
Should the creator of the WWW be sad that it gave him joy? Or the scientists who programmed the Apollo missions, because they also made money off these things or worked for others while doing so at times? Or in a different direction, should a Picasso or Anthony Hopkins not take enormous pleasure from a life time of professional creation? Much more banal examples are just as valid, as long as they gave sincere happiness to those living them.
What a bizarrely narrow definition you have of professional joy.
Also, to answer specifically to these folks, maybe they shouldn't be morally, but if it made them personally proud, as far as quality of life FOR THEM personally goes, it's still a valid example. Morality and personal happiness aren't always directly connected in some people.
Several years later, I'm living in the Bay Area and working for Wikia (now Fandom), acting as their resident Solr expert after taking his advice to heart. Wikia was investing in their structured data initiatives, and ended up bringing Gregg onto exactly the team I was attached to in order to investigate how to apply his area of expertise to our vast store of user-generated, semi-structured data. The opportunity to work with such a talented researcher in a consultative capacity was a tremendous learning experience.
I felt privileged to get to work with someone I had admired early on and made an impact into the trajectory of my career. The takeaway from this is probably that you don't necessarily know whose future your might touch with a presentation or with friendly advice casually offered at a conference or meetup.
Something tells me I'm one of countless cases where Gregg didn't just push the science of structured data and the semantic web forward, but helped to mold expert practitioners through his kindness and enthusiasm for the work. In this way, his legacy will be long-lasting and inestimable.
archive.org copy is at https://web.archive.org/web/20110913122328/https://greggkell...
He worked at NeXT and Go Corp.'s Eo spinoff, two hot startups of the late 80s/early 90s.
It’s incredible that someone could have such symptoms for a year and not a single doctor ordered an abdominal ultrasound. Given the outcome, this might have been a blessing, he was able to live his last year without knowing about the disease, which realistically isn’t curable. But at the same time, it could just as easily have been another abdominal tumor where a year’s delay would have made a huge difference.
May he rest in peace and bless his family.
"I first was confronted with my prospective early mortality back when I contracted Hodgkin's Disease (and later ITP) in my 20's and early 30's."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreaticoduodenectomy
That said, it would depend on several other factors, not least catching the tumour early enough - and it looks like a pretty tough thing to go through even if successful.
> This is major life-changing surgery with a long and difficult "recovery". I have elected not to do this, due to existing co-morbidities from my sorted past and the expectation that the recovery would exceed my lifespan, which I'd rather keep as normal as possible.
I wish I'd known about that post before he died; I'd have sent him my best regards personally rather than just saying nice things about him online now :(
My dad lived for two or thee years after diagnosis, mostly with fairly good QoL. He did have "NanoKnife" which seems to have helped extend things without much negative impact so that's worth looking into for those in a similar plight.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_electroporation
Thanks for JSON-LD (and YAML-LD) and your contributions to so many W3C specifications over mailing lists and ReSpec specification documents!
Now I'll have to finish a PR to pydantic_schemaorg to build data validators for Linked Data that - by conforming to W3C Standards - enables industry and research to describe all of the things in a giant LODcloud.
yml2vocab also processes RDFS vocabularies.
JSON-LD, for example, makes it possible for all of us to find the website URL and phone number and business hours and accessibility info for an Organization > LocalBusiness Place on the map with :latitude and :longitude fields, find and annotate CreativeWorks, ScholarlyArticles, PDF DigitalDocuments, SoftwareApplications, FHIR JSON-LD,.
JSON-LD foregoes XML parser complexity (and vulns), but because JSON-LD maps to RDF with an @context, you can use vocab URIs for XML XSD types like xsd:boolean and xsd:float64 and so on. But there's yet no standard way to express a complex number like 0.8+0.8j with XSD or RDF or JSON-LD.
Is that something that can just happen to people and be no meaningful signal that anything is wrong? Ie. can a perfectly healthy person struggle to gain weight if they’re trying? I guess I’ve always perceived it to generally be the opposite.