I didn't know him when he joined my AdWords team in '04. He was the next to join after me. He was 24 (I was 29) and he was known by a fun nickname and he had already co-written a BOOK ferchrissakes.
Worse, he was going to be working on the stuff that I had asked to work on (but had been told we didn't have time for).
I had him sized up all right. I didn't like hotshot kids like that.
Then he pops into my cube one day and asks if I could help him get IntelliJ working.
This immediately surprised me. Hotshots don't ask random nobodies for help! In our field I guess it's the purest sign of humility and respect we have.
My times of not liking Bob Lee were over by about 12 seconds into that conversation.
Once we got it working, I casually mentioned something about the work he was assigned to do -- that I was so jealous about -- and I will never forget what he did. He said "yeah, so I was thinking we might do something like..." and just like that we were COLLABORATING.
That is who Bob was.
And we kept collaborating. He started fixing our dependency hairball issues using injection, and my friend Z and I eagerly adopted what he was building in a second subproject. Soon Bob and I were having interesting design discussions almost every day, figuring out how to turn his brilliant ideas into an open-source product. That became Guice.
When designing a new thing Bob was like a kid at Christmas. I have emails from him sent at odd hours with subjects like "we can solve <X> like <Y>!!" and no body. Classic Bob.
Bob was genuine, kind, and fully possessed of the joy of making things. And he was unlike any other tech person I've met.
His tech accomplishments go on for miles, but I am positive that the list of people like me whose lives he changed for the better is longer.