Was the lead engineer at NeoPets (10/2000 - 11/2002)

Focused on scaling (30m+ users), security (hackers), but also built guilds & games

After NP, had some success/exits as founder/cto (+ many lessons), 30+ 😇  investments

Love builders, helpers, and of course, Farcaster

Feel like a trip back to Neopia? 🙃

AMA

perpetual learner • curious builder • art lover | bazvault.eth | barrycollier.com | hosting /baz /givingflowers

Tech: What stack you were building on? Who were the competition?

Scale: What were some of the limitations of the infrastructure? 

Product: How did you get a sense of what users wanted or needed? 

I was running a super popular hotline server at the time (1999 - 2002)

wears many hats (tap pfp) 🎩 zachharris.xyz

php3 (php4 was a huge ordeal but eventually got to it)
mysql for most non-critical data
Oracle databases for critical data (accounts, etc.)

We were constantly running up against max connections on the b, so we ended up having to build our own connection pooling libraries in C to bring down the load

I remember the Database Admin I worked with at blip.tv could out drink and out bet all of the engineers full stop. Those MFs were ninjas.

No, it was primarily a LAMP stack.

We had the Oracle databases because MySQL just couldn't manage at the time. We had 2 great Oracle DBAs on the team that I worked closely with for tuning and just trying to constantly optimize