beeen a whileThe Owen Byrne Interview
I've had the pleasure to get a chat interview with Owen Byrne, the co-founder of Digg.com, which is one of the top 100 sites on the web. Credit is due to Dewayne (Owen's unofficial publicist), for permitting the opportunity to get this interview. You can read more about Owen Byrne on the Wikipedia article. What follows is the questions I've asked him, following his response. This interview was made October 7th, 2006.
How long have you been a software developer and what was your first programming language?
About 20 years. First language was C. I worked for an oceanographic company - scientific programming.
Since you've been programming for quite some time, what is your view point on the evolution of programming? How do you believe it has improved over the years?
I'm not sure it has. Someone I like to quote says that everything we do now was done in Lisp and Emacs in the early 70s. I think what has happened is that the hardware we deploy to has become much more pervasive - so it's easier to get stuff out in front of people quickly. The web means that you can write some software and put it in front of millions of people the next day. Then get feedback and immediately improve your software.
So you're belief is that programming has not really evolved, but shall I say, just become more productive in terms of rapid application development?
I think that the core technologies have not really evolved, but that there may be some surrounding technologies that have made the whole process easier. So we have IDEs, we have better revision control systems, standard methods for testing, and deploying software, and a huge global infrastructure (the web, and the search engines, and blogs) for getting something you wrote from you to the world. In the past that was a much bigger issue.
What would you consider your favorite desktop programming language and your favorite web programming language to be?
It's like asking what your favorite song is - I don't really have a favorite. Right now I use php for my job, and some java. I can't remember the last desktop program I wrote. Before that I used perl and tcl/tk. Actually the last desktop thing I wrote was probably in tcl/tk. I play a little with rails but it's not part of my job so it's still just play.
Many people have asked this question to others, but I'd like to ask it myself. What is your definition revolving around "Web 2.0"?
An O'Reilly trademark *smile*. I think it's more about a new generation of users who grew up with the web. The broadband generation so to speak. When you're online all the time, the usage is somewhat different than when you had to go through the whole dialup procedure. Users are willing to put more investment of their own time into the online experience. Web 1.0 is like email, web 2.0 is like IM.
Do you believe a seamless integration of desktop applications and the web will be the future?
I don't know if we'll ever do "seamless" but there will be more integration. Integration is the messiest part of working with computers, where personalities and corporate agendas come into play. The technical issues always seem to be less important than the human issues. iTunes on a Mac is very nicely integrated with the web, but step off of OSX and then it's not so much. Because Steve Jobs doesn't REALLY want you to run iTunes on your pc, he wants you to eventually buy a Mac.
How did you get started with Digg and how did you meet Kevin Rose?
I was working in Europe during the bubble, and in March 2000 I found myself unemployed - kind of a shock because I had never had less than 2 jobs in the past - full time and part time. So I ended up freelancing on elance.com. I bid on a couple of jobs Kevin put up there. Very small jobs. But then he referred some friends of his to me and I got some larger projects. Then in the fall of 2004 he came back to me with what he said were a "couple of small projects". A small one and a big one actually. I was living on the east coast of Canada at the time - Nova Scotia - that's where I'm from. It's somewhat well known for what they call "nearshoring" - like offshoring.
Is it possible to give any details of those two projects, or is it confidential information?
What I meant is that the small one is digg.com. We never got to the big one. Just a little joke, but it really does describe how things went. Basically a small little thing that grew way larger than either of us expected.
When you first started working on Digg, did you know/think it was going to become what it is today?
Not while I was building it. But after we launched, the growth was pretty impressive. Dec. 2004-Mar 2005 was a pretty exciting time. It seemed like every day we just blew through our expectations. Basically we grew about 20% per month steadily. Then at random things would happen and we would double overnight.
What do you believe the success of Digg has been? Any marketing or PR secrets you'd like to share? Or has it's success been soley on it's idea?
I think that Kevin showing it on TechTV gave us an initial group of enthusiastic users. Then we just had to be responsive to what they asked us for. The other key thing was we did really well with search engines. Lots of text basically. Have you heard the Paris Hilton story? (No, I had't been familiar with the story) In Feb. 2005 we were on one server still, and growing steadily. Then one morning I woke up and the server was dead. Took me 15 minutes for ssh to connect, load factor over 100. It turned out that Paris Hilton's cell phone was hacked, and various nude and semi-nude pictures plus phone numbers of celebrities were posted on the web. Someone on our site linked to that site. And then Yahoo crawled us, and we were the #1 and #3 search results for "Paris Hilton phone". So that was one of those events where we doubled overnight in traffic. It was a little stressful, but fun. I optimized a lot of sql that day.
Are you currently working on any other projects Digg-related? If so, can you tell us what they are?
I can't really talk about features we haven't deployed, sorry. I'm employed full time at digg now - moved to San Francisco last October.
So I'm assuming then you currently have no other jobs outside of Digg? Might I ask, how many digits do you make a year (out of pure curiosity)?
I do small jobs for previous customers occasionally on the side. I can't really tell you what my salary is. But I can tell you that a recent survey here found the average salary for programmers is about $120k. And I'm below that. But I have some equity so that's ok. It's expensive to live in Northern California.
My response:I've heard, I live in Washington State myself. Many people from California have moved over to Seattle in recent years.
The article I saw says they're all moving back *smile*, Silicon Valley is booming again.
What is the most defining moment in your life?
I don't think there really is one, unless it's a failure. If you succeed at something, you are presented with new obstacles to overcome - each one more complex and "defining" than the last. Perhaps losing my job when the bubble burst in 2000. Because it meant starting over from nothing in a lot of ways.
If you could give one piece of advice in life for success, what would it be?
Do what you like. I know a lot of people who try to make career choices based on future salary expections, only to have the whole world change while they're still in school. It's better to pursue something that you will be passionate about. That being said, I wanted to be a poet when I was in high school *smile*. It seems like that directly led to my experience with digg and brought me to Silicon Valley - kind of, sort of, a rags-to-riches story. Though I wasn't in rags then and I'm not rich now.
Great, that was my last question. Any last words for the readers?
digg on! *smile*
This interview was conducted by Daniel Moxon, owner and founder of Programming-Designs.com