MarketWatch
Stories from my career at MarketWatch and musings on the media business. I recall dinner with former colleagues, share anecdotes about forecasting and describe the “Two Second Test” for news websites.
- Feeling fairly stupid having trouble migrating to WP 2.5 built-in avatar support and ditching Gravatar plugin. Ugh.
- Avatar success! Magic is:
<?php echo get_avatar($comment, '50'); ?>and it does everything, entire IMG tag. - I cannot even begin to express how much I love the Search Regex WP plugin. It has saved me hours!
- A little overwhelmed by how much cleanup work I need to do on my blog. Not WP 2.5 related, just years of messy junk.
- Changed my whole permalink structure and have done everything I can to make it right. Wondering how much of a hit I’ll take from Google.
MarketWatch, Dow Jones Chapter Closing
Today I’m closing a very long chapter in my career. This is my last day at Dow Jones/MarketWatch. This transition has been in the works for a while. It was announced in January and over the course of the following months I’ve been able to wrap-up some projects, transition others and most importantly work to get my replacement hired and up-to-speed. I’m happy to leave on a Friday, and have a new CTO start on Monday to take the organization forward. My replacement will be in New York which I think will be immensely helpful. I’ve been able to do a lot from Minneapolis, but moving to New York isn’t in the cards and it was time for me to do something different.
The past 10+ years have been amazing. This chart is a great representation of all the twists and turns that have occurred over that period.
This is a tough day. It’s filled with a lot of emotion. I’ve found myself reflecting a lot over this week. Remembering a lot of past colleagues, all the great projects and even some of the bombs. It’s been amazing to see an organization grow and change through so many events. I’m incredibly proud of everything that has been accomplished by such this great team.
I’ll be taking a respite this summer and enjoying a great number of trips with my family. Stay tuned right here for news on those travels!
Flashback: MarketWatch in Windows 2000 Launch
There are a few points in the history of BigCharts and MarketWatch that I’m especially proud of. Perhaps one of the most prominent ones, and most public, is the inclusion of the BigCharts BigArchitecture (the name we retroactively gave the COM-infrastructure behind MarketWatch and BigCharts) in the scalability demo at the Windows 2000 launch event. The video is a fun watch.
Prelude
We had been working with Microsoft pretty extensively at this point in part because we were trying to run our stuff on Windows NT 4.0 and it was horrible. We were having immense problems. We decided to throw a “Hail Mary” and upgrade to the unreleased beta of Windows 2000 Server. It worked! Our problems, which I can’t even remember now (anyone?) went away, and our sites stabilized.
Microsoft knew about the success we had had and was looking for the scalability demo for the launch. They called us about 10 days before the launch event to see if we could do it. We sent one of our systems team out that night. When he got there, Kristian Meier called me on my mobile saying “Dude! Do you know what they want me to do?! This is awesome!” We really hadn’t had time to brief him before his flight.
They made images, installed 500 clients, a bunch of servers, some databases and loaded it all up on trucks to drive from Redmond to San Francisco.
Event
Microsoft only gave us two seats on the floor for the event. Chris Tersteeg and I attended. The screen that they had MarketWatch on in the auditorium was immense. To this day I don’t think I’ve ever seen a screen projected bigger. They brought MarketWatch up live during the talk and at one point the page refresh kicked in. The whole screen went blank and Chris and I sat there with our heartbeat stopped waiting for the page to redraw. I don’t think there has ever been a more anxious page view to the site.
There is a funny editorial aside here. The newsroom was of course covering the launch of Windows 2000 and the theme of the coverage was that it was generally a non-event. We had a headline, above the fold that morning, called “Windoze 2000 Launch” and there was a picture of a guy sleeping next to it, if I remember right. Microsoft of course called me with panic since this wouldn’t exactly be the kind of headline you would want on the screen during the launch event. I called our editor to see what we could do. He appropriately suggested that we hope something new happens to take the headline off the site, otherwise, pound sand. Luckily some new news broke!
The demo was awesome in person. Seeing 500 client machines drive huge traffic to your code base was great. After the launch event we called it a day, rented a convertible and drove around the valley for the afternoon. We also made a stop at Fry’s to pick up some toys.
What a great event. Thanks to everyone who made it a reality!
I sent this tweet four hours ago. Your getting it now, in the future, from me in the past.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Why is it so predictable that the one button Mazie would be most obsessed with on my MacBook Pro is the POWER button.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
The question isnt if, but to what extent, I’m addicted to the Internet.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
I wish time didn’t go so very fast when I’m jamming on my laptop in the evening.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Life Tip #845: Completely finish the electrical wiring work on your aquarium before filling it with water and putting fish in it. Ugh!
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Flashback: The Day Webfront Died
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.
At a dinner with at least 10 doctors. Tempted to stab myself with a knife to see some action.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.