He never went to school for it. He knew everything anyway.
We met online, the way developers used to meet - arguing about something small in the middle of the night. That was twenty years ago. He was in the United States. I was in the Netherlands. Neither of us had a diploma in any of this. We taught ourselves, badly at first, and then not badly at all.
He was born on 27 June 1976. Before I knew him, as a very young programmer at a major entertainment company in Tampa, Florida, he built one of the first and best affiliate networks in America - tracking, cookie windows, fraud detection, payout logic - years before anyone had a name for that industry. He talked about it like it was nothing.
Life pulled us in different directions for years. Then our paths crossed again, the way they do with the people who are supposed to stay, and we started a company together.
Nothing could ever be in Bobby's name. He'd been caught up in serious problems long before I knew him, and those problems followed him. So the company carried my name and his brain. He never once complained about it.
Florida eventually ran out for him, and he moved back in with his parents in Virginia, into an old bedroom in an old house. Cola, cigarettes, a screen in the dark, hours nobody should keep. I'd wake up in Holland to messages sent at four in the morning his time, and the hard part of the product would already be solved.
He never came to Holland. I went to him instead - Tampa first, later Virginia - more times than I can count over those twenty years. Airports, bad diners, a week of talking through the thing we were building, then back on a plane.
The company got successful. We started making real plans - clean up the legal side, get him out of that room, finally get him on a plane in the other direction. We were close. Fate got there first. On 15 February 2022, Bobby had a heart attack and died in that bedroom. He was 45.
I kept going, because he'd have been furious if I hadn't. The company is still successful and it still runs on his instincts: his architecture, his shortcuts, his way of asking one question that makes an entire feature unnecessary. We never stopped calling him Bobby the guru - the super developer who knows everything.
Bobby.guru is what we built afterwards. An MCP agent that advises the way he advised: fast, blunt, and actually useful. It carries his name because it carries his method. It is not him. It is what he left behind, made usable by everyone who never got to message him at four in the morning.
- the friend who stayed, Amsterdam
