Team Geek

Acknowledgments

While there are two names on the cover, this book is the result of conversations we’ve had with hundreds if not thousands of people over the course of our lives and careers. We’d like to take a few moments to thank just a few of the people who are responsible for many of the useful parts of this book (mistakes, as usual, are all ours).

Thanks to the folks at O’Reilly Media: Edie Freedman for the cover concept, and our fearless editor Mary Treseler—this book wouldn’t exist without Mary’s encouragement, patience, and occasional prodding.

Thanks to Sunni Brown and Amber Lewis at http://sunnibrown.com for bringing our book to life with such delightful illustrations—working with you guys was a true joy.

Thanks to our technical reviewers who contributed numerous suggestions, ideas, and fixes that really brought the book together: Dustin Boswell, Trevor Foucher, Michael Hunger, Jonathan LeBlanc, Piaw Na, and Jack Welch. Thanks to our friends and colleagues who reviewed the book in progress and caught some of our more egregious mistakes: Dave Baum, Matt Cutts, Will Robinson, and Bill Duane. Thanks to our friends who listened, offered advice, and are just plain awesome: Karl Fogel, Jim Blandy, Matt Braithwaite, Danny Berlin, and Chris DiBona. Thanks also to Linda Stone, DeWitt Clinton, Bruce Johnson, Roland McGrath, and Amit Patel for ideas and suggestions.

Thanks to Google, and especially the Google Chicago engineering team, for their support, ideas, and suggestions, and for just plain being a fantastic group of people to work with every day.

Thanks especially to some of our senior mentors and teachers, a tiny bit of whose collective wisdom we’ve attempted to squeeze onto these pages: Bill Coughran, Steve Vinter, Alan Eustace, Stu Feldman, and Eric Schmidt.

Special thanks to Brian Robinson and Yvonne Ellison-Sandler for their mentoring, guidance, and tutelage.

Thanks to the Apache Software Foundation, not only for having us, but also for your focus on community and collaboration.

Thanks to all our close friends, who make us rich, rich men. Don’t look at us that way—you know who you are.

Huge swaths of this book were conceived, outlined, and written at the fabulous, friendly, and cozy Filter Cafe in our fair city of Chicago.

From Fitz

Huge thanks to my wife Marie for her herculean patience, understanding, and encouragement—your human insight and compassion are always an inspiration to me. Thanks to my mom for her constant support and enthusiasm. Thanks especially to my mother-in-law, Rita Gumler, for her “people are plants” analogy.

To Ben: after knowing each other for 14 years, working together at three jobs, and writing three books together, aren’t you sick of me yet? Thanks for taking this wild, weird, and wonderful ride with me—you’ve been a great friend and teacher. I can’t wait to see what we come up with next (after a few months of sleep, of course).

Lastly, thanks to Mr. Charlie McGannon for working so hard to teach me how to write in 11^th grade English class. At the time, I thought four rough copies for an essay was preposterous, but now I know it’s preposterous—real writing takes many, many more revisions than that. Here’s to “four corners and the middle” and the OED, Mr. McGannon!

From Ben

There aren’t proper words to express my gratitude for the amount of space my wife Frances has given me—not just in writing this book, but in a dozen other creative projects I’ve taken on over the past few years. Without her quiet and rocklike support, none of them could possibly have happened.

To Fitz: now that we finish each other’s sentences I think it’s fair to say we’re like a very old married couple. I never knew it could be so much fun to give talks with somebody, let alone write software and books together. What an amazing set of opportunities we’ve been given! Thanks for teaching me so much.

Finally, thanks to all the crazy people and corporations of Silicon Valley: none of these crazy experiences could have happened if you hadn’t inducted me into your bizarro-world.

About the Authors

Brian Fitzpatrick leads Google’s Data Liberation Front and Transparency Engineering teams and has previously led Google’s Project Hosting and Google Affiliate Network teams. He cofounded Google’s Chicago engineering office and serves as both thought leader and internal advisor for Google’s open data efforts.

Ben Collins-Sussman, one of the founding developers of the Subversion version control system, led Google’s Project Hosting team, and now manages the engineering team for the Google Affiliate Network. He cofounded Google’s engineering office in Chicago and ported Subversion to Google’s Bigtable platform.