I started in the catalog department at Amazon in 1997, right as Glennf left. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the desks were made out of doors. It just seemed like giant clunky desk to me.
One thing I do remember distinctly about Glenn's time in the catalog department was this terrifying 60k Perl script I inherited from him called sitecounts.pl. This script examined all the various catalogs (books, reviews, etc) and attempted to generate some interesting stats about them. One day it just broke, and since it was used in the catalog build process to verify that things were sane, it needed to get fixed pronto. The code was plenty confusing, but what was the worst part was the extent of the right margin creep, I'm talking 150+ character lines -- not exactly easy reading on my crappy 15" X-terminal. I felt like a character in a HP Lovecraft story, slowly descending into madness as I learned more about the horrors of this script.
I ended up maintaining and adding to this script my entire first stint at Amazon. Eventually as I added features and changed things, it slowly got made sane over time, save for a little bit of madness that I kept in there just so I'd have a reminder of what it was like.
One thing I do remember distinctly about Glenn's time in the catalog department was this terrifying 60k Perl script I inherited from him called sitecounts.pl. This script examined all the various catalogs (books, reviews, etc) and attempted to generate some interesting stats about them. One day it just broke, and since it was used in the catalog build process to verify that things were sane, it needed to get fixed pronto. The code was plenty confusing, but what was the worst part was the extent of the right margin creep, I'm talking 150+ character lines -- not exactly easy reading on my crappy 15" X-terminal. I felt like a character in a HP Lovecraft story, slowly descending into madness as I learned more about the horrors of this script.
I ended up maintaining and adding to this script my entire first stint at Amazon. Eventually as I added features and changed things, it slowly got made sane over time, save for a little bit of madness that I kept in there just so I'd have a reminder of what it was like.
Ah the 90s. Good times.