Gregg Kellogg has died
lists.w3.org302 points by daenney 2 days ago
302 points by daenney 2 days ago
Very sad to hear.
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.
"If you know Rebecca (many reading this won't), you know how amazing she is. She's worked with many cancer patients, though her work at Commonweal, and her numerous award-winning cook books. She would call me her "rock", but really, she's mine. I have been unbelievably lucky in life, and particularly in my relationship with Rebecca.
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.
"If there's ever a good time to go out, it's now. Anything else would just be gravy on top."
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.
Professional joy does not matter. Do not make your job your life. Family matters, personal goals matter, professional goals however do not. When my father had cancer the only question his employer ever asked was "when is he coming back to work? We need him here". He passed not long after. Your work does not care about you, no matter if its a corporation or a tiny business. If your personal goal is to be a professional at your job making as much money as possible, honestly, that's just sad.
You spend a third of your life at work. Better for it to be something you can enjoy and be proud of than not.
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.
> Better for it to be something you can enjoy and be proud of than not.
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.
Professional joy usually doesn't come from making as much money as possible. It comes from creating work that you are proud of, doing the best of your abilities, or making a difference in others' lives - were I Greg Kellogg, I would find my career at W3C rewarding too.
Passion, drive, and existential fulfillment can take many form, and "professional joy" can absolutely be one of them.
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.
It's hilarious this is being blasted. People on this website are so sadly out of touch and misguided.
Consider that it’s possible for other viewpoints to be valid for many people. I don’t think folks are “blasting” the GP because they’re all blind careerists; I think it’s because it discounts alternative points of view rather flippantly.
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.
People are sadly out of touch and misguided for scorching an absurdly narrow definition of professional joy that categorizes all manifestations of it as the same stupid thing? Really?
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?
It's possible to enjoy work and make time for family, too. It can be difficult to find such a job, but it's worth the effort.
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".
I am lucky enough to work for a friend of mine and I like the job. Its not fulfilling though. I can pretty much work on whatever I currently want as long as it supports the business but its all meaningless. I'd find joy in working on something that can actually help people in a meaningful way. Working on event tickets and cashless payment isn't really that...
I'm pretty sure everyone gets to choose what makes them happy. Sorry, I guess, if criticizing the life choices of a dead person are what makes you happy.
I did not take it as criticizing, but holding it up as an example of a life well lived. TLDR "The work won't love you back, pay attention to what can be learned from Gregg's life experience he shared." Certainly, seek out meaningful work, but prioritize loving relationships over it.
> "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...
Full disclosure: I haven't read the book myself. Logically, however, expressing regrets does not say anything about whether a specific course of action is better. By definition, one can only regret living one's life in a certain way if one actually did - so perhaps a high incidence of people regretting "working too hard" is simply indicative of working a lot being the most common experience, rather than any special reason why a life spent working should be regrettable.
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.
That's a pretty privileged take there. No, not everyone gets to choose what makes them happy when they have obligations to others or even to themselves if they want to eat that night or not. Glad you do, but don't assume everyone does.
I think that is a misrepresentation of what the parent was saying. OP is not suggesting everyones gets to do what makes them happy, but rather they are free to say what is important for their happiness, even if others disagree.
This seems like a misreading of the comment. Anyone can choose for themself what matters to them, which is a different question from to what extent you can get everything you want without compromises.
Professional joy can be about a lot more than just making as much money as possible. If anything is sad it's that someone fails to understand this basic thing. We're thinking, often fantastically creative beings, and our lives need not focus only on family, love and friends. They can also be partly absorbed by our external pursuits, professionally, as an outlet for all that cognitive power inside us.
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.
Should the people who built Palantir be proud of their work? Or the people who built Amazons employee surveillance?
What an idiotic whataboutism that has nothing to do with my main point. Because people who work for morally ambiguous projects might also be proud of their professional work, nobody working on anything else should be? Or what are you saying, because it seems a bit muddled.
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.
I really admired Gregg early on in my career. He gave a fantastic talk in Austin, Texas back in about 2007 or 2008 for a Semantic Web Meetup (at a venue called "The Boom Boom Room" funnily enough) back when I was working as the resident search expert and linguist for an SEO consultancy (remember those?). He talked about RDF, OWL, and SPARQL, and some of the iterative ways we could get there on the sites we're building in a way that had me enthusiastic for the web's future. I spoke with him after the conference, and if I remember correctly, he encouraged me to start looking into Lucene after hearing about my job.
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.
Gregg helped me and my team many times - pro bono. I once made a silly typo in some code that he kindly reviewed. When he found the error, he pointed to it with a wink. Always helpful on big stuff and small stuff. His tools are first class. And I had an online dialog with him within the last 2 months and had no idea about his condition. Will miss him.
I you don't know who Gregg Kellogg was: https://greggkellogg.net/foaf
His resume link 404'd.
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.
> In August 4th, I went into the MarinHealth Emergency Room, due to increased stomach pain on top of symptoms which became more acute in June. I've had a reduced appetite, with consequent weight loss, for about the last year. I had been fighting to keep weight on for some time, then in July, Rebecca and I went back to our usual haunt at the Hotel Wailea in Maui, which we love. Towards the end of the trip, I had a sudden and dramatic loss of appetite, more than the usual.
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.
Don't underestimate human incompetence and pettiness. I have a similar story, and now have to live with an ostomy and chronic latent cancer that could flare up at any time.
Especially given that (from his FAQ 'You seem oddly calm about this.' )
"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."
You always need different opinions. It took me three different doctors to finally get the prescription for cancer screening due to family history. One would thing this kind of stuff is protocol but many times it is subjective, completely up to the doctor's opinion. For doctor 1 it may not be alarming enough and for doctor #3 crazy you didn't start the screenings 5 years ago. That was my experience, and this was at the same hospital network in the same city.
Did he see a doctor about it before the ER visit? This is a good reminder to not shrug off things like unplanned weight loss - see your physician!
Pancreatic cancer can be curable in some cases - see the Whipple procedure:
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.
Gregg chose not to undergo surgery:
> 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 :(
Ah, I missed that bit, thanks. My dad had (and died) of pancreatic cancer and it was too far gone for Whipple to be on the table. However I think he too might not have chosen to go ahead with it even if it had been an option.
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
/? pancreatic: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=pancreatic
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.
I read his page about his health (I’m thankful for those who choose to do this) and I’m wondering if someone can help me understand how a year of reduced appetite and weight loss doesn’t trigger any alarms.
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.
That was fast, which feels oddly positive. My brother died from cancer and spent a full year in agony. I do cancer screenings every 3 years given my brother died relatively young from stomach cancer. Lately I have been thinking on adding whole body MRI scans to my screening process but I keep reading conflicting evidence on their effectiveness. My brother’s cancer was detected late and would have been easy to treat and perhaps even survivable if detected early. I also have two close friends diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in their 30s, again both with high survival rate on early detection.
Holy cow! I litterally convinced TODAY my data governance team to investigate the adoption of JSON-LD at scale on our web service internal portal. Kudos man! Your heritage is still alive!
Very sad to hear this. I interacted with Gregg a few times in Open Source projects, and he was always very easy to work with, even though he appeared to be quite busy and involved in multiple initiatives.
I worked with Greg many years ago, back at EO. Very smart and all, but what stood out most was that he was just a really good person. Very sorry to hear this news.
First saw his name when looking into the RhapsodyOS boot process. Might still be in every iPhone to this day.
Pancreatic cancer is horrible. It killed my mother within two weeks of the confirming biopsy.
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