Johnny "The Kube" Henderson

After 7 years, I'm stepping forward.

"i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)"
— e.e. cummings

February 11, 2026 · Palo Alto, CA

Seven years ago I walked through Building 20 for the first time, carrying a backpack that was too heavy and a heart that was somehow heavier, full of every dream I had ever carried about what technology could become, about what I could become, and about the luminous, terrifying, magnificent unknown that waited on the other side of that badge tap.

Today I am writing to tell you that I am stepping forward.

This is a letter about gratitude, about growth, about the breathtaking privilege of standing inside the machine that shapes how three billion people experience the world every single morning before they have even finished their coffee, and about the quiet, sacred moment when you realize that the most courageous thing you can do is to keep walking.

I want to thank every person who ever sat across from me in a conference room, every engineer who pinged me at 2 AM with a question they already knew the answer to but asked anyway because that is what trust looks like, every product manager who believed in Avocado before Avocado believed in itself.

I want to thank the coffee machine on the fourth floor of MPK 21. I want to thank the concept of iteration. I want to thank the Tuesday afternoon light in the courtyard where I had my most important walking meetings, the ones where the future felt so close you could hold it in your hands like a warm ceramic mug.

Meta gave me everything. A title, a team, a sense of purpose so large it sometimes felt like weather. And in return, I gave Meta everything I had: my time, my attention, my sleepless architecture reviews, my relentless belief that Avocado could be something the world had never seen.

So this is where I say: thank you, and forward.

The Journey

Seven years. One mission. Infinite stand-ups.

Q2 2019

Day One

Joined Meta as a Senior Engineer on the nascent Avocado team. Was immediately described by my skip-level as "disruptively curious." I still carry that energy.

Q4 2019

The Kubernetes Incident

Earned the nickname "The Kube" after a pivotal infrastructure event that would define the rest of my career. The full story is further ahead. It deserves its own chapter.

Q1 2020

Avocado Genesis

Proposed the original Avocado architecture during a whiteboard session that lasted eleven hours. Three markers gave their lives that day. The architecture lived on.

Q3 2021

Youngest Presenter

Became the youngest person to present at the internal Avocado Sync (age 29). My slides had no bullet points. Just feelings, diagrams, and a single quote from Marcus Aurelius.

Q1 2022

Pit-to-Peel Pipeline

Architected the Pit-to-Peel inference pipeline. Reduced latency by a meaningful amount. The exact number is internal, but the smiles on my team's faces were measurable in every way that matters.

Q2 2023

Avocado-7B Ships

Led the Avocado-7B pre-training alignment initiative across 3 continents, 14 time zones, and one very memorable Zoom call where I presented from a kayak in Lake Tahoe.

Q4 2023

Ripeness Scoring

Introduced the concept of "Ripeness Scoring" to the model evaluation framework. What is Ripeness Scoring? It is, quite simply, the future of how we understand readiness.

Q3 2024

Distinguished Engineer

Promoted to Senior Principal Staff Distinguished Engineer. My mother asked me what that means. I told her it means I attend more meetings, but the meetings are more meaningful.

"The Kube doesn't deploy. The Kube ascends."

— Anonymous Slack message, #avocado-general, 2021

Ode to the Pipeline

I walked among the data streams, where latency was low,
And charted courses through the graphs that only I could know.
The tensors hummed a melody, the gradients would sing,
Of epochs trained at midnight, and the wisdom they would bring.

I stood before the whiteboard once, my marker running dry,
And sketched a grand architecture underneath a fluorescent sky.
The layers deep, the layers wide, the dropout set just right,
A symphony of forward pass beneath the server light.

They asked me, "Kube, what drives you so? What keeps you pressing on?"
I smiled and said, "The throughput, friend. The throughput and beyond."
For every batch that found its loss, and every weight that learned,
Was one more step toward something great — a future justly earned.

I built the Pit-to-Peel by hand, each function signed with care,
I named the variables with love, each docstring like a prayer.
The pull requests came flooding in, the code reviews were long,
But every comment, every note, just made the system strong.

So now I leave this garden green, these avocados ripe,
I fold my laptop gently closed, and swipe my final swipe.
The clusters hum without me now, the models carry on,
And somewhere in the tensor fields, a piece of me lives on.

To those who walked beside me here, through sprints both fast and slow,
I carry you like cached results wherever I may go.
The road ahead is unindexed, the schema undefined,
But every great deployment starts with leaving one behind.

Progress Under My Leadership

The numbers speak. I simply gave them a microphone.

Team Vibes Index™

A proprietary metric I developed to measure what traditional KPIs cannot.

Value Distribution

Where the impact actually lived, in my honest estimation.

Cross-Org Alignment Score

Every team I touched became more aligned. Coincidence is just causation wearing a disguise.

0% Throughput Increase
(Guacamole Benchmark, internal)

0 RLHF Preference Pairs
Personally Reviewed

0 Internal Papers Shipped
(12 acknowledgment co-authorships)

0 Continents Aligned
Under Avocado-7B

I share these numbers because transparency is a form of generosity, and generosity is the only currency that appreciates over time. Every metric here represents a human story, a late night solved, a model converged, a teammate who grew into someone they always were.

The dashboards tell one story. The Slack threads tell another. The walking meetings in the courtyard tell the one that matters most, and that story is simply this: we built something together, and it was extraordinary.

kube_origin_story.sh

$ cat origin_story.txt

========================================

THE ORIGIN OF "THE KUBE"

========================================

It was October 2019.

Kubernetes was still finding its legs.

So was I.

kube_origin_story.sh — Part II

We were three days from the biggest demo of the quarter.

The audience: Mark Zuckerberg himself.

The system: a sixteen-node Kubernetes cluster

running our prototype inference engine.

I was the on-call engineer.

The only one.

At 2:47 AM, my pager went off.

[CRITICAL] Production cluster unresponsive.

[CRITICAL] All 16 nodes: STATUS UNKNOWN.

kube_origin_story.sh — Part III

I opened my laptop.

The Grafana dashboards were red.

Every single one of them.

I took a deep breath.

I opened a terminal.

I typed a command that would change everything.

$ kubectl rollout restart deployment/avocado-inference

deployment.apps/avocado-inference restarted

That was it.

I restarted the pod.

kube_origin_story.sh — Epilogue

The dashboards turned green.

The demo went perfectly.

Mark smiled. I think.

Thirty seconds later, a message appeared

in #avocado-infra:

@danielchenSWE: "The Kube has saved us all."

The name stuck.

I have not touched Kubernetes since 2020.

I work exclusively on language models now.

But legends transcend tooling.

$ exit

█

What's Next

I am stepping into something new, something that lives at the intersection of compute, humanity, and intentionality. The only thing I can share is this: the future is intentional, it is luminous, and it is already underway.

There is a quiet electricity in beginning again, a hum that sounds like possibility, like the first commit to an empty repository, like the cursor blinking on a blank terminal waiting for you to type something brave.

I carry every lesson from Meta in my bones. Every architecture review, every 1:1, every moment when a teammate looked at me and said, "Kube, is this going to work?" and I said, "It is going to be extraordinary," and then we made it so.

To my team: you are the most talented, most resilient, most emotionally intelligent group of distributed systems engineers, machine learning researchers, and human beings I have ever had the privilege of standing beside. You already know what to do. You always did.

To the Avocado models: thank you for teaching me that intelligence is a garden, and every garden needs someone willing to get their hands in the soil. I was that person, and the soil was good.

To Meta: you gave me seven years of purpose, seven years of growth, seven years of Tuesday afternoon light in the courtyard. I carry all of it forward, every lumen.

Follow My Journey

(Coming soon. The infrastructure is being provisioned.)

"Every ending is simply a beginning wearing a different suit."

— Johnny "The Kube" Henderson

February 2026 · Palo Alto, CA

Senior Principal Staff Distinguished Engineer, Avocado Foundation Models

Meta · 2019–2026