I started writing my story but it became too long so I posted it here. http://dbasch.posterous.com/how-did-you-become-a-hardcore-back-end-develo http://dbasch.

I started writing my story but it became too long so I posted it here. http://dbasch.posterous.com/how-did-you-become-a-hardcore-back-end-develo http://dbasch.posterous.com/how-did-you-become-a-hardcore-ba... Tl;dr: in 1998 I created an mp3 search engine that got significant traffic, had to learn on the fly, ended up going to Inktomi where I joined a team tackling much bigger problems. We all learned a lot over the next four years.