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!
Changing Primary Workstations
As I get ready to leave Dow Jones I’ve been working to get my home office setup more streamlined for work. I think I’ve succeeded, and am in store for a big upgrade actually! Here is my current workstation at the office, where I spend most of my computer time.
Find and upload Office Workstation farm4.static.flickr.com/3053/2440404104_c8cc6fd4d2.jpg
And this is what I’ll be using at home.
Find and upload Home Workstation farm3.static.flickr.com/2308/2439579081_df7b9a4c2c.jpg
Yeah, that will work. 🙂
Upgrading my Windows XP virtual machine to SP3. Long, long, long… will visit it in the morning.
Completely flattered by all the amazing emails I’ve been getting from people as my final day at Dow Jones approaches. In the end, it’s all about people.
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!
Playing with Bento for the first time. This has some real promise. Would be a killer app if it had great iTunes integration.
Awesome dinner and conversation with Greg Merkle tonight. Great stuff!
Realizing how completely opaque, confusing and non-sensical Unix file system permissions can be to non-geeks.
Power WordPress Session at Minnebar
Minnebar is approaching this weekend, May 10th! I’m really excited and I just couldn’t stand to not be presenting this year so I decided to put my name up and do a session on Power WordPress usage. I plan to hit on must-have plugins that can save you a ton of time as well as some great SEO tactics for driving more traffic to your site. It should be a lot of fun!
I also hope to get some feedback and talk a bit about doing a WordCamp in the fall.
Going to catch the end of the Living Green Expo!
Sitting down for a game of Risk. I’ve only played this on the computer so far. “You don’t know real risk!”
All the money references in the movie Wall Street just smack you around all over about how old it is.
That and Gordon Gecko’s giant cell phone.
Previewing my Handbrake rip of Wall Street on my Apple TV. Looks great with full functionality. Nice.
This new service, Dropbox, looks pretty cool. I may happily be able to abandon FolderShare finally.
At This American Life live broadcast.
Wiping my MacBook Pro hard drive clean for the next person.
Listening to Big Smith on the way to work. Wahoo!
The newest Handbrake may make my iTunes/movie project achievable in a finite period of time. Nice.
“Give me the beat boys
and free my soul;
I wanna get lost
in your rock ’n roll
and drift away.”
Scanning photos really highlights how amazing a good digital camera is. Hard to get a scan to look decent.