Jon Christensen and Rich Staats learn about Chris Hickman’s first venture-backed startup (circa 1998) and its goal to build a database for Internet-scale applications. His story highlights what software is all about – history repeating itself because technology/software is meant to solve problems via new tools, techniques, and bigger challenges at bigger scales.
Some of the highlights of the show include:
Why Chris left Microsoft and how much it cost him; yet, he has no regrets
Chris’s concept addressed how to build a scalable database layer; how to partition, chart, and cluster; and how to make it highly available and a completely scale-out architecture
Chris couldn’t use the code he had created for it while at Microsoft; but from that, he learned what he wouldn’t do again
Chris let the file system be the database at Microsoft, and the project was named, Internet File Store (IFS); it used backend code and was similar to S3
Chris named his startup Viathan; had to do copyright, trademark, and domain name searches
Data for the Microsoft project could be stored in files/XML documents; Viathan took a different approach and used relational databases instead of a file system
Companies experienced problems at the beginning of the Internet; rest of ecosystem wasn’t developed and there weren’t enough people needing Internet solutions yet
Viathan went through several iterations that led to patents being issued and being considered as Prior art
Viathan’s technology couldn’t just be plugged in and turned on, applications had to be modified – a tough sell
Chris did groundbreaking work for what would become DynamoDB
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