Daily Archives: April 13, 2005

In February, I started a new job that it’s been really hard describing to people.

>> “What do you do?” they’ll ask.
<< “I program stuff.”
>> “What do you program?”
<< “Web services.”
>> “What’s a Web service?”
<< “It’s something that allows another application to access your data.”
>> “But isn’t your company tied up in Firefox somehow?”
<< “Yes. I write Web services that we hope will help enhance the browsing experience.”
>> “How?”
<< “I can’t really say very much about it right now. I’m writing extensions to go along with the Web services.”
>> “How’s your company going to make money?”
<< “Nice weather we’re having today, huh?”

Well, we finally launched our Web site yesterday after a lot of work by a guy named Joel Apter, whom I hooked up with as a developer resource on the Spread Firefox project, and a designer named Bryan Bell who’s great at icon work in particular and who can be contracted for pretty darned reasonable rates. These guys did the bulk of the site so that I could work on my mysterious Web services and extensions with limited distractions. And I think they did a great job.

I spent some time the night we launched doing some benchmarking and tweaking to make sure our site scaled pretty well, and I’m happy to say that we weathered a slashdotting with aplomb, the site hardly affected by the heavy traffic.

For now, our site doesn’t say a whole lot about what we do. Out of the gate, our offering is sponsorship of several popular Firefox extensions. Basically, we’ve given money and other resources (server infrastructure) to these developers both to support their great work and to attach our name to their popular products. We have a lot more on the horizon, and with a little luck and a few more twelve-hour days on my part, we’ll have a beta release of what we hope will be a pretty exciting extension near the end of the month. Continue reading →