This is a remarkably well-written article. Made me really feel for the company, both in terms of sympathy and wanting to see them succeed.

One thing it did left me wondering, was covered in the final paragraph:

"...Engineers can spot his name and edits throughout the code repository. And occasionally, back-end commands will pop up messages, little surprises that Tang built into the system years ago. One reads, “You’re doing a good job today.”

How would your company react to messages like that? Do any of you take a strategy for injecting joy into your code?

At my company, each of our API responses sends a randomly selected compliment in an HTTP header. When we're onboarding new engineers, everybody's first commit to the codebase is adding a compliment to the list.

Nobody's noticed yet because the API is currently consumed only by us, but maybe they will someday. :)

I like that approach. Might I ask what the header is? HTTP-COMPLIMENT or somesuch?

It could be a fun 'standard'.

We prefix all our custom headers with `X-Ark-` (for auth tokens, request IDs for logging and such), so in this case it's `X-Ark-Compliment`.

Also, another thing we do to propagate joy in engineering culture is make heavy use of Phabricator macros in the code review process. It adds a lot of humor to the situation to have somebody draw attention to a bug in your code by pointing it out with an epic skateboard accident: http://giphy.com/gifs/fail-SMwheKIMDwA00

I know a small partnership added "key man insurance" recently. Don't know rate but exams were required.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_person_insurance

Seems like a great idea. However, not sure how much money would help in this situation.

Money can help get through the time you need to get back on your knees. I've had the misfortune of having my cofounder die after 18 month and two investments rounds and some money would have really help. Also you have to prepare for this kind of problems in advance because all of a sudden a substantial part of the shares of the company will be in limbo until the legalities are handled (and it can really stink if the family of the deceased is not helping...) which means: you can't raise money anymore, you can't really hire someone good as most people are very afraid of this kind of situation.

All good points. Thanks.

I couldn't imagine any small company who didn't have life insurance on its owners - I thought that was like one of the first things you did. Guess it gets overlooked.

>who took intense joy in little things like drinking Diet Coke through a straw to avoid cavities

I'm not the only one!

... but Diet Coke doesn't have sugar in it, so it shouldn't cause cavities, right? Did a joke just go over my head or am I missing something?

Diet coke has phosphoric acid which causes erosion of the enamel.

It's not the phosphoric acid, its the carbonation. Plain old carbonated water is acidic as well which can erode the teeth. That being said your saliva can repair the teeth. The current wisdom is don't drink solely acidic drinks and wait between acidic food/drink and teeth brushing.

Or chew gum with xylitol (It's actually natural birch sugar) that will heighten the PH level and kill germs.

> This is a haiku / To ask you, please turn off your / ad blocker. Love, Forbes

Here's a better one: / I use ad blockers because / your ads annoy me.

What of his equity?

Presumably it's now owned by his estate, like the rest of his assets.

He probably had a vesting schedule. So it may not be all that large of a chunk of equity.

He did not say "mindf dash dash k." He said "mindf em dash k."