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I dated someone whose father had a small business that made home goods products (e.g. specialty laundry detergent, waterproofer, etc). He was a smart but challe

I dated someone whose father had a small business that made home goods products (e.g. specialty laundry detergent, waterproofer, etc). He was a smart but challenging guy. Definitely the sort of father who didn’t think any guy was good enough for his daughter. Remember the first time she took me home to meet her parents in South Carolina for Thanksgiving he was, literally, cleaning his gun on the front porch. He primarily sold his products through big box retailers like Walmart and was getting squeezed on margins. I suggested he should sell direct through a website. He scoffed at the idea. On the long drive back to Chicago my girlfriend brought it back up and asked if I could help put her dad’s business online. This was 2001 so there weren’t really any easy options to create what he needed. Ended up spending nights and weekends for the next month building a whole shopping cart, storefront, and payment gateway. Remember learning just what a pain getting SSL setup correctly was at the time — which was part of the inspiration for Cloudflare making it free and easy many years later. Gave the site to him for Christmas. He spent the whole day playing with it and then bragging to his friends he was now in “e-commerce.” Girlfriend was very happy. We continued to date for another 4 years until her medical career took her East and starting a company took me West. Still friends to this day. I think her dad’s company may still using a lot of my old code. (Which, to be honest giving my coding skills, is a bit terrifying.) Ecommerce has become a big part of their distribution. And I still buy and use his detergent, which is terrific for cleaning performance fabrics like Gortex and washing sheets if your skin is sensitive to perfumes or dyes.

eastdakota 6y ago
One more that’s fun, though maybe doesn’t really count as “programming.” I got married a few years back. We built a wedding website for people to get details on our wedding and to RSVP. It was pretty standard (think we just used Squarespace) except we included tracking pixels for the largest ad networks (Google, Facebook, etc) throughout the site. We then bid on impressions from anyone whose browser had triggered the pixel. We bid something absurdly high, like $1,000/CPM (i.e., $1,000 per thousand ad impressions). As a result, we were always the highest bidder for those impressions of people who’d visited our wedding website. Because of how ad network bidding works, where you generally pay what the second highest bidder bids, and because we only invited around 200 people to our wedding, we didn’t end up spending much at all. Think all in it ended up costing around $100. But for our guests, our wedding followed them wherever they went online. If you hadn’t RSVPed yet, we showed banners encouraging you to RSVP. Once you had, we previewed some of what we had planned. And then, for a week afterward, we ran ads thanking people for coming. We set the entire thing up in an afternoon and then it just ran automatically over the next few months. I was stunned when I checked in on it after the wedding how little it had cost. Ad retargeting is super creepy, and it was scary to see how granular I could make the targeting for very little money. But, in this case, I think it may be one of the few times people really loved being followed around the Internet by an ad. Nearly everyone commented on how fun it was. Friends would send us screenshots of our ads next to articles they were reading. And many of our privacy conscious friends with ad blockers actually turned them off temporarily when they heard about it so they could get retargeted by our wedding.
- underdeserver 6y ago
  Wow, that is... unique.
- jedberg 6y ago
  Ok, this is both creepy and brilliant. I'm totally doing this for the next major life event in which we set up a website. Kids bat-mitzvah maybe?
- brianswichkow 6y ago
  So... a friend just sent me this as I'm known as "the guy who pranked his roommate with Facebook ads [1]." I'm also getting married on 11/11. This is absolutely brilliant. My partner and I [2] thank you for this. PM me, we'd love to invite you and your partner to our (digital) wedding. [1] http://ghostinfluence.com/prank http://ghostinfluence.com/prank [2] http://partnersinpresence.com http://partnersinpresence.com
  - lukevp 6y ago
    I would love to see the CEO of CloudFlare come to your wedding. Your prank article was a nice read and I had a good laugh.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > I'm also getting married on 11/11. Ah, 光棍节, the most spiteful wedding date possible.
ponker 6y ago
I was going to say how sad that something like starting a company ended your relationship then clicked through to see what company you started.
- eastdakota 6y ago
  I started another company that didn’t do as well before I started Cloudflare. But think, company or not, our relationship had run its course. We could have made sticking together work. But a natural divergence in our paths made us diverging in our relationship very natural and harmonious. She’s happily married with a healthy, happy child today. And my only regret is I didn’t convince her to come to my wedding… even with lots of retargeted ads.

eastdakota 6y ago

One more that’s fun, though maybe doesn’t really count as “programming.” I got married a few years back. We built a wedding website for people to get details on our wedding and to RSVP. It was pretty standard (think we just used Squarespace) except we included tracking pixels for the largest ad networks (Google, Facebook, etc) throughout the site. We then bid on impressions from anyone whose browser had triggered the pixel. We bid something absurdly high, like $1,000/CPM (i.e., $1,000 per thousand ad impressions). As a result, we were always the highest bidder for those impressions of people who’d visited our wedding website. Because of how ad network bidding works, where you generally pay what the second highest bidder bids, and because we only invited around 200 people to our wedding, we didn’t end up spending much at all. Think all in it ended up costing around $100. But for our guests, our wedding followed them wherever they went online. If you hadn’t RSVPed yet, we showed banners encouraging you to RSVP. Once you had, we previewed some of what we had planned. And then, for a week afterward, we ran ads thanking people for coming. We set the entire thing up in an afternoon and then it just ran automatically over the next few months. I was stunned when I checked in on it after the wedding how little it had cost. Ad retargeting is super creepy, and it was scary to see how granular I could make the targeting for very little money. But, in this case, I think it may be one of the few times people really loved being followed around the Internet by an ad. Nearly everyone commented on how fun it was. Friends would send us screenshots of our ads next to articles they were reading. And many of our privacy conscious friends with ad blockers actually turned them off temporarily when they heard about it so they could get retargeted by our wedding.

underdeserver 6y ago
Wow, that is... unique.
jedberg 6y ago
Ok, this is both creepy and brilliant. I'm totally doing this for the next major life event in which we set up a website. Kids bat-mitzvah maybe?
brianswichkow 6y ago
So... a friend just sent me this as I'm known as "the guy who pranked his roommate with Facebook ads [1]." I'm also getting married on 11/11. This is absolutely brilliant. My partner and I [2] thank you for this. PM me, we'd love to invite you and your partner to our (digital) wedding. [1] http://ghostinfluence.com/prank http://ghostinfluence.com/prank [2] http://partnersinpresence.com http://partnersinpresence.com
- lukevp 6y ago
  I would love to see the CEO of CloudFlare come to your wedding. Your prank article was a nice read and I had a good laugh.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > I'm also getting married on 11/11. Ah, 光棍节, the most spiteful wedding date possible.

ponker 6y ago

I was going to say how sad that something like starting a company ended your relationship then clicked through to see what company you started.

eastdakota 6y ago
I started another company that didn’t do as well before I started Cloudflare. But think, company or not, our relationship had run its course. We could have made sticking together work. But a natural divergence in our paths made us diverging in our relationship very natural and harmonious. She’s happily married with a healthy, happy child today. And my only regret is I didn’t convince her to come to my wedding… even with lots of retargeted ads.