BigCharts
Memories and milestones from my time co‑founding BigCharts. Posts include charts comparing SPSC’s stock performance, tributes to colleagues and reflections on launching BigCharts and its enduring legacy.
Blog Categories via LLM
After using GPT-5 to create category introductions for my website I got to thinking about the categories themselves.
With over 9,800 blog posts spanning 20+ years it is daunting to figure out an approach to categories. It is especially daunting to approach them in a way that would make sense to a visitor to my website. As a test, I gave this challenge to GPT-5 using Agent mode. It took 31 minutes to do the research. I have no idea how many web pages it hit on my site (I wasn’t watching!). It gave me a whole report and the results seem really solid.
Each one of these is also provided a description and examples posts that would fit into it. This seems like a great place to use AI.
Going through my blog and assigning posts to these categories could be done with a script and some vibe coding. Perhaps this will be a winter project for me.
All of this has me thinking that it would be nice for micro.blog to do this for me. I wouldn’t mind having micro.blog use AI to recommend categories for me. But then separately, now that we have categories with introduction text take each of my blog posts and ask the LLM to categories it into the existing structure. All the data is there. 🤔
This chart of SPSC performance since IPO is amazing. Compared to the high growth tech giants — outperforms AMZN, MSFT, GOOG, AAPL. 🤩
Remembering Matthew Dornquast
I first met Matthew when he was CTO at Fallon. It must have been 1997. I don’t remember how we got introduced to each other. We both went to the University of Minnesota in Computer Science but Matthew was a few years ahead of me and we didn’t overlap there. I do remember meeting Matthew though. We were building BigCharts and Matthew and I immediately connected on our shared passion for technology and specifically the Internet and the rapidly evolving web. Matthew was very smart, passionate, focused. I remember him talking about moving on and doing something new, the thing that eventually became Code42. Not before I tried to persuade him to join our ragtag band at BigCharts. But it was very clear that he wanted to pursue something on his own.
We stayed in touch over the years and would regularly meetup to chat technology, the Internet, startups, etc. He returned my favor of gently trying to bring him into BigCharts when we had lunch downtown and he gauged my interest in joining them as they started to build out CrashPlan. I was an early user of the peer-to-peer version of CrashPlan and used it to for a neighbor and I to be each others offsite backup. As always, Matthew was passionate, excited, driven and always focused on the technology.
Matthew and I would regularly connect around our shared passions and joint focus on doing everything we could to make the Twin Cities technology community stronger. Matthew was always a dedicated supporter of Minnebar and Minnedemo. He cared deeply about the technology community around him, and always showed up to support and grow the talent around him. I will forever miss that about him.
Matthew and I never did get to do a project together. I have an incredible amount of respect for what he built. Through the consulting business of Code42 they bootstrapped a product that became the largest Series A investment in Minnesota history. In the middle Matthew made several bets in early stage companies by building the technology in return for some equity.
Unfortunately it has been a few years since we connected. After Matthew moved on from Code42 and moved to New York we didn’t have those serendipitous moments to connect. But by his tweets you can see that his passion for technology was present through all of his life. It is sad to see a mind as bright as his go so early in life.
Thank you Matthew for all you did for the technology community, and for building so many things that continue to provide value today. You will be missed.
Related
Happy 23rd Birthday BigCharts!
On this day, 23 years ago, we launched BigCharts.com. The time before and after that was fun, stressful, and filled with unknowns. It was a great ride. One of the defining experiences of my life. I love that the site is still around, serving charts for all that want! I’m sure code I wrote is still running on it. 😬
I bet that it is one of the very few sites that can show a graph of the Dow Jones Industrial Average back to 1970. I know because I was the one that backloaded that data into the database!
I love that the size of chart bigger than Large is still called Big! I remember the laughter when we came up with that obvious label.
It still is one of the few sites that will give you a historical quote, with the price info for a given day in the past, backing out splits.
I remember the up2.aspx page that we used for the load balancers to make sure servers were healthy.
Here is a team photo from June 9, 1999. It was a tech team dinner at Buca. What a great team!
I hope the site enjoys its 20s and is around for decades to come!
I also shared this on LinkedIn and hopefully we’ll get some old school BigCharts folks commenting.
Raspberry Pi vs SPARCstation 20: Fight! ← 20 or so years ago we launched BigCharts on a SPARCstation 20! 😀
Star Tribune in April 1999 on BigCharts Acquisition
I’ve been cleaning through old files and found the copy of the April 30, 1999 issue of the Star Tribune that I had saved with the article about BigCharts being acquired by CBS MarketWatch. I couldn’t just recycle this before running it through the scanner. Phil sure had some hair back then. 😀
Funny that Phil actually did relocate to San Francisco area, just about 10 years later than this article and had nothing to do with BigCharts or MarketWatch.
Just hung this BigCharts.com memory in my new office.
Very impressed with TradingView. If I were to build BigCharts.com again today, I would like to think it would be what they did.
Today is the anniversary of BigCharts.com I still remember watching those first chart requests scroll by.
On this day in 1997 Philip Hotchkiss, me and a team of 6 launched BigCharts.com. Great memories!