I’ve been cleaning up some old, old files on my machine and have run into some really fun stuff. I’ll have a few posts with some of this stuff.
Here is a fake homepage for MarketWatch that was created by our editorial team in San Francisco on the day that webfront died. You see, in the ancient days, MarketWatch had one publishing server called webfront, and one day it died. It was never coming back and that sucked. We couldn’t publish anything. We had been working on other solutions and those got an immediate boost that day. In the matter of 24, or 36, or 48 hours — the number seems to get bigger with time — we put in place a whole new system for publishing content.
The pictures of me sleeping on my couch and Chris in his chair were taken after an all-night slog to restore publishing. Oh, those were the days.
Ugh. I remember that day. Only time I’m glad I forgot to take test code out before a production release.
Funny you should post that. That was from the day I started at MarketWatch… July 10th, 2000. With everyone busy fighting fires (a fairly common thing back then!), I sat and waited for hours in the lobby until Parker finally came and got me. I distinctly remember thinking, “What the heck kind of company is this anyway?”
Tim,
“What the heck kind of company is this anyway?”
I hope that was the last time you ever said that :-)
No comment ;)
Man am I glad I missed that. I must’ve left about a month before that happened. Of course a year later I was looking for a job after all of the consulting firms went belly up.
I remember spending a couple hours a day modifying regular expressions trying to keep the content flowing to the licensing clients (“Etrade’s broken again!”).
Good times.
Wow. That couch looks too familiar – hope I never have to use it.