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Wednesday, June 13, 2007
So the cat is out of the bag.
I left my last job with Infospace in March to join a startup. As some of you know, there were reasons to stay at Infospace at the time, though I would have been bored as hell. The startup came along really out of the blue, and it was completely the right fit for me.
Two weeks ago we came out of the land of conjecture and launched [ Mahalo.com ] at the [ D conference ] . Today we launched a companion to the main site, [ Greenhouse ] .
While the core application is MediaWiki with a number of extensions, there are a lot of other systems at work on both Mahalo and Greenhouse. On a technical level, there are a number of things we’re doing that are outside of the box - we use multicast for a lot of unexpected things, as well as multicast DNS. We use C extensions to everything from memcached to MySQL to support our needs, have (some) Java, a lot of PHP and Python. I don’t want to even think about how many shell scripts I’ve written in the past month or so as we neared launch for everything from monitoring to deployments!
Needless to say, this is a far cry from what I had been doing at Infospace. I was tasked with rich media applications for mobile, and for a year worked on a set of projects that would have been revolutionary in the mobile industry had they been released. In mobile, however, at the end of the day you are at whim of the carriers. That is not a position I liked being in, no matter how compelling mobile applications could be.
So that’s what I’ve been up to. Still racing, still training. I’m shooting for North America’s toughest Ironman-distance race this year in Nevada, which is a big step up for me. It certainly will be an interesting summer!
[ 6/13/2007 03:47:00 PM ] [
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