Before joining Amazon in 2002, I built and ran Syndic8, a side project site that collected, polled, and organized RSS and Atom feeds for easy discovery. In addition to the web UI, Syndic8 featured a comprehensive web service API, powered by the then-popular XML-RPC protocol.
Syndic8 was built on PHP and MySQL and hosted at a colo provider. I was never able to scale beyond a single instance at my colo, and have sometimes thought about how I would rebuild the site today using EC2, S3, DynamoDB, and so forth.
My operational experience with XML, RSS, and web services was (I was later told) a deciding factor in the decision to hire me.
Before joining Amazon in 2002, I built and ran Syndic8, a side project site that collected, polled, and organized RSS and Atom feeds for easy discovery. In addition to the web UI, Syndic8 featured a comprehensive web service API, powered by the then-popular XML-RPC protocol.
Syndic8 was built on PHP and MySQL and hosted at a colo provider. I was never able to scale beyond a single instance at my colo, and have sometimes thought about how I would rebuild the site today using EC2, S3, DynamoDB, and so forth.
My operational experience with XML, RSS, and web services was (I was later told) a deciding factor in the decision to hire me.