Brad Feld

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The Brilliance of Binary Stars

Dec 24, 2018

I love the concept of Binary Stars. Ian (my co-author) and I are using it in our upcoming book The Startup Community Way which should be out in the second half of 2019.

Amy gave me a New Yorker article titled Binary Stars: The Friendship That Made Google Huge. It’s the story of the partnership between Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat whose pair programming approach in the early 2000s changed the course of the Google and the Internet.

It’s a magnificent and delightful story. If you are a programmer, engineer, creator of any kind, or are interested in Google history, you’ll love it.

If, like me, you alternate between solo efforts and partnerships, it’s also wonderful.

Some of my best work has been done with a partner. While what I’ve done with Amy is the most visible example of this, collaborations with Dave Jilk, Jason Mendelson, David Cohen, Lucy Sanders, and many others come to mind. And, most recently, I’m excited about my work with Ian Hathaway.

Binary Stars can be magical, and not just in space.