https://web.archive.org/web/20050416110703/http://www.bbc.co...
Within 2 weeks we managed to get our first band signed. A Swedish band called Maas. I worked with a producer Andrew Barron, who takes a lot of credit for seeing the project past the finish line. Andrew sat with me over a weekend and deep into a Sunday night to get it finally launched.
The project was written in mod_perl and was designed to be extrememly high performance because Radio 1 at the time (and perhaps still is) the most popular radio station in the UK. And we expected a surge of traffic every time the DJ mentioned OneMusic, which is exactly what we got.
I was based in Oxford Circus and I worked with the ops team which - at the time, and I'm not sure if this is still the case - was based out in some mansion in the country somewhere. They had a kind of Bletchley Park vibe about them - this team of absolute gurus who you only got to speak with over the phone, and who would somehow make your application handle the massive amounts of traffic that would be thrown at it. They did a great job hosting that application on Apache/mod_perl in the dark days before Nginx was invented.
One of the absolute worst design decisions I made was to design the application so that it would support sessions for users without cookies enabled. Which is why that Archive.org link has the OMSID query string parameter in it. The app would dynamically modify all URLs on the page to embed that assigned session ID so it stuck, even if you didn't have cookies enabled. It would follow you around the site as a query string param. I stupidly suggested the idea to Andrew and he was like "Hell yes, lets do that!" and so I did. But it had big performance implications as the URLs had to be dynamically generated for every pageview, and it added significantly to the time it to for me to create the project. But hey, we did it, and got it launched, and it actually worked and provided sessions for users who had cookies disabled.
The project taught me a lot about high performance websites, delivering a critical project on-time to a big audience, and I went on to create WorkZoo (Time Mag top 50 website of 2005) which I sold, Feedjit (live traffic feed on over a million sites) and my current cybersecurity business Wordfence which employs 40 and is the best available security product for WordPress. I think creating all those projects set me up to create a WordPress plugin that is high performance, widely compatible, very stable, and delivers on user satisfaction.
When I left the BBC, the team bought me a bottle of Gran Centenario Reposado tequila out of their own money. I'll never forget that and I'll never forget them. Such a great group of people.