Joe Miller (AKA Joe Linden) passed away on July 27th after a battle with cancer. Joe was Linden Lab’s VP of Platform and Technology Development between 2006 and 2010. The sad news was reported yesterday by Linden Lab in a blog post : Remembering Joe Miller and a further blog post by Hamlet Au over at New World Notes : RIP Joe Miller, Linden Lab’s Beloved Former Platform VP. Hamlet’s post contains a link to a memorial page about Joe.
Joe joined Linden Lab in 2006 and in a press release from Linden Lab he said :
I’m thrilled to join the team responsible for Second Life, the most interesting interactive platform in existence today. By drawing upon my background in product design and user experience, I look forward to helping make Second Life even more accessible to residents worldwide.
Joe was interviewed by Catherine Smith (AKA Catherine Linden) back in January 2008 regarding the work Linden Lab were doing in Second Life. The interview was part of a podcast series called Inside The Lab and can be listened to here. In the podcast Joe talks about how the Lab were moving away from their downtime procedure. Older residents will remember that the grid used to be taken down for several hours whilst updates were rolled out to the grid. Joe also talked about :
- Sim stability – with the launch of Havok 4.6
- Sim performance – with the introduction of Mono for script compiling
- Viewer stability – by introducing a new crash reporter and graphics card drivers
- Viewer performance – via Windlight and the new Dazzle UI
Whereas this podcast is more than six years old and many improvements have been made during that time, it still makes for interesting listening because it talks of the challenges of a user generated content virtual world and those challenges are still very relevant today.
Joe also worked on one of the large changes to Second Life, the introduction of voice :
For me, Second Life has always been more about human communication, collaboration, and spirit than about technology. When I talk to Residents about their experiences, one of the recurring themes is improving our communication methods. For so many, Second Life is a place to make and meet new friends and collaborate with others, whether that’s in a business, educational or purely social context.
That’s why today I’m pleased to announce our intention to bring integrated voice capabilities to the Grid. This will enable all Residents to speak with each other if they wish, in addition to the existing Instant Messaging and group chat functions.
Many of you know that voice has always been part of the long-term plan for the Grid, and we truly believe voice can be a transformative technology that will lend more immediacy and dynamism to the way Residents communicate.
Voice was a controversial move but one that was needed. Voice remains a choice but it was successfully implemented and is used by many in Second Life today. In a blog post announcing the introduction of AvaLine, Joe said :
Voice has been an integral part of Second Life experience since it launched in 2007. Today, over 50% of Residents use voice everyday, 97% of Second Life regions are voice enabled and Residents are now consuming voice at a rate of over 1 Billion minutes per month making Second Life one of the largest VoIP providers in the world.
Avaline of course wasn’t quite as successful as Linden Lab may have envisaged but the post exemplifies that voice was a correct move by Linden Lab. However as VP Of Technology Joe also blogged about downtime, releases and fixes. In a blog post from 2006 entitled Releases: past, present, and future Joe addresses what was then known as downtime Wednesday. People who joined Second Life a few years later will be bemused by all this talk of downtime, but back in the day that was the way it was. Joe was amongst the many Lindens who have worked hard over the years to reduce that downtime. In the blog post Joe addresses an issue that still gets raised today :
let me provide a little more visibility into what we have been and are doing to make Second Life a more stable and reliable experience for everyone. In the recent past, there has been a concern voiced in the forums and other venues that we have been spending too much time on “features? and not enough on fixing long-standing bugs and usability annoyances in the platform. We hear you. What isn’t obvious from the release notes, however, is the work we have undertaken to make a series of changes to the underlying architecture of the system to support a rapidly growing population in Second Life.
While it took us roughly three years to reach an active resident population of 100,000, we’re now growing at a rate that adds nearly 100,000 new users per month. This rate of growth has led us to make a series of design changes to our “backbone? and to the way data and messages flow through the system. Each of these changes are carefully designed and coded by our development teams, peer reviewed, unit tested, alpha tested, functionally tested by our QA department on test grids, then finally “previewed? for a period of time on a public test grid for your beta feedback. We carefully review our readiness to release any new code onto the live production grid based on a set of criteria that I will share in a separate future blog entry. We also perform simulated load testing on portions of code that are meant to handle very high transaction levels in normal use, but, ultimately there is no effective way available to us today to simulate the actual conditions present on the production grid.
Times have of course changed and the way releases are unleashed upon the grid are very different from how they were in 2006, but here we see that Linden Lab did hear those complaints about spending too much time on new features and not enough time on fixing bugs. Despite those changes, people still make those comments today. However the quote from Joe does exemplify the background work from Linden Lab that all too often isn’t recognised.
Joe was also prepared to get out and about the grid and talk to people. Here we see Joe at Copper Robot :
Picture by Crap Mariner and used here with recognition of a Creative Commons License.
Whereas many of us know Joe from his work on Second Life, he also worked for SEGA, Knowledge Universe, Perilux, Atari, and Sportvision.
Joe passed away peacefully surrounded by his family and love ones. The memorial page for Joe ends with a message from his children :
Rest peacefully, Dad. We’ll take it from here.
Picture of Joe at SL7B by Kimberley Winnington and used here under a creative commons license.
RIP:(