Nelson has left the building

Posted by pat 154 days ago

Nelson Minar announced that he's leaving Google, and sadly this one's not an april fool's joke: this is a bittersweet news for me. He was one of the engineers who really pushed very early on for Google to provide APIs, which is part of what draw me to this company. He started the search and AdWords API products.

I first interacted with him when I was at Sun, providing him a patch for their search API java client library to add support for proxies (I had to decompile it because they were not providing the source for it :-) Then last year we talked a lot before I took the job of evangelist for the AdWords API, and until december when he went on leave, I considered him my informal mentor at Google.

But while I'm sad not to be able to work with him anymore, and learn from his daily example of calm, dedication and smartness and from his encyclopedic knowledge, I'm happy to see him consider new projects (I look forward to play with whatever he comes up with), and can only cheer at his decision to go live in France for a few months: french VCs and startup geeks, grab him while he's there!

Goog luck Nelson, whatever you're up to, it was a pleasure working with you. I'll do my best so that your API mindset legacy thrives at Google.

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Kohai said about 1 hour later:
> [...] I considered him my > informal mentor at Google. Sounds like you have lost _your_ Sempai. (Not only) from now on, others will learn from _you_. It is a pity that I did not get to know Nelson and it is quite ironic that he goes to France, when I am leaving it... To me, you are a good Sempai. It is just a shift of generation. Your Kohai
P@ said about 4 hours later:
Thanks Thomas, I appreciate the comment: you're a great Kohai! It's not really a generation thing, I think Nelson is younger than I am:-) We all learn and teach all the time, different things, from different people. I'm sure you are teachning to many people yourself already. Your sempai.