[thelist] Who is this guy?

David.Cantrell at Gunter.AF.mil David.Cantrell at Gunter.AF.mil
Thu Oct 10 08:47:01 CDT 2002


>One of clients, a brand new one, told me I should really read Philip
>Greenspun's site, in particular his Guide to Web Publishing:
>http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/
>
>Anybody know about this guy and his site?

I just have to chime in on this. I have a great deal of respect for Philip.
He's a computer science professor (formerly at MIT, not sure if he's still
there) and an avid photographer. He built photo.net as a way to get other
photographers together.

To me he embodies one of the great things about the Internet: he gives back
to the community. Photo.net is probably what he is most proud of because it
is a labor of love, but he has also built several services that anybody
could use for threaded discussion, collaboration, link management, mailing
list management, traffic analysis and server uptime reporting. All around
1995. They are legacy now, but he is considering upgrading them someday.

Not sure if it's still the case, but several years back his site ran
entirely from his home, with hardware donated by HP and Sun. According to
photo.net he now serves 34 million pages a month, 1 million unique, 135,000
registered users, $10 million annually in photo equipment auctions, etc.
Somewhere else on his site I remember seeing stats of something like 20
requests per second on average to his RDBMS.

He's not a designer, he's an engineer. And a very, very good one at that.
I'd call him the least-well-known hero of the Internet.

-dave

PS Here are other things he's written. Every book he writes, "published" or
not, is available on his web site for free. Period.

His resume  (you will be impressed)
http://philip.greenspun.com/narcissism/resume-list

Internet Application Workbook  (How to build "things like Amazon")
http://philip.greenspun.com/internet-application-workbook/

Travels with Samantha  (Boston to Alaska and back with his dog, very
beautiful and sad story)
http://www.photo.net/samantha/

SQL for Web Nerds
http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/



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