It's pretty much my only "impressive" job of my career, in terms of name dropping at parties. But in terms of technology and business it was a madhouse. I remember thinking "Nothing like a business was happening at Esty." when they fired me. (I was going to quit, but my girlfriend at the time convinced me not to, and then they fired me a week or two later anyway. Long story.)
I always figured someone would eventually show up and want to interview me about it, but that's never happened so far.
I've forgotten most of the wild stuff.
All the business logic was in stored procedures in the DB so as you can imagine it was always on fire. Upgrading didn't help because our growth rate was ridiculous.
The frontend PHP guy was a newbie to programming. He barely knew what he was doing but he could nail those beautiful UX designs pixel-perfect. The guy's probably a millionaire now.
The backend sysadmin, DBA dude was a total Master-Blaster. If he didn't like it he would literally throw a fit and scream at the CEO and shut things down until he got his way. He used to lie to the CEO all the time if he didn't want to implement something he'd just say "it's impossible".
They built a skateboard half-pipe in the office even though none of us skated.
It was pretty nuts.
I found out later on that they hired me because my resume was the first one on craigslist that had Python on it. Then during the interview they found out I used Devorak layout on my laptop and that's why they hired me.
The "middle layer" they had me write was pretty much useless. It basically passed requests from the webservers to the DB. Over 80% of the API was empty methods, literally just a docstring, with all the processing happening in a decorator.
I implemented a cache in there (early use of Memcache. Glyph hisself wrote a Twisted interface to it in front of mine eyes! They were like "We want to hire a networking consultant. What about this guy?" Me: "You want to hire Glyph and I get to hang out with him and learn from him!? Yes. Yes, please." So that was nice.)
The thing is they didn't turn on the cache. It just sat there. The investors pushed this Sid person onto us to try to get some semblance of adult supervision. ... I've told this story before, Sid wanted some information on long-running requests, and I had to switch it (the cache) on in prod myself to show them that the required logging was already there.
There there was the other Sid who wanted to rewrite everything in Java. (First Sid wanted to rewrite in C++.) "Project Phoenix" he called it, that didn't go over well.
(Recall that the problem wasn't the implementation language of the server code, it was that all of the business logic was in stored procedures in the DB so rewriting the server code was never going to help.)
That's all I got this morning.