bonus tracks (tech speak alert)
After reading this, it occurred to me that I should have name-checked more people when I was interviewed. It was an incredible team, so here are a few more tales.
One of Jason Birch's many contributions was the said "FTP script" which replaced MS Replication Server. It wasn't so much a script as a highly scalable, fault-tolerant replication system (written in 36 hours), a direct descendent of which is probably still running today.
Matthew Wood was the chap who turned us all on to WebObjects. Convincing me really took some doing, because we didn't have the server muscle to use it in its intended dynamic mode. Instead, we wrote a system to capture dynamically published pages as files, then push them out. This was fantastically cheap, because Apple's licences were based on the number of simultaneous connections to the server. Using dynamic serving, there would have been thousands of connections. Using our system, there were only six.
Antony Tittle had the thankless task of dealing with the sports, weather and financial feeds. All the providers would make unannounced and undocumented changes to their formats, usually during the wee small hours of a New Year's morning. Ant would remotely log in and tweak the parsers, probably without putting down his pint.
Our original sys admin, Chris Hughes, personally attended every server crash within minutes, day or night, with a level of discipline which almost compensated for the anarchy reigning throughout the dev team. His first move was to eliminate novelty server names. He was also the only person who shared Jason's surprising taste for European dance music - Encore Une Fois!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
