Out of Cheese

Back around the dawn of time — the summer of 1999, specifically — I was an intern at Homestead Technologies. My three months there were a terrific learning experience. I wrote a ton of Java code, doing serious Java development for the first time; wrote my first seriously complex real-world application — an IIS plug-in in C++ which could accept a file of any size as a download without using more than about 8K of memory; learned a terrific lesson about the non-portability of HTML as I spent two weeks working on an HTML renderer in Java which tried to match the layouts of both IE and Netscape; and learned a lot about how startups work while meeting a lot of great people. Homestead at the time was a hotshot startup of about 35 people, vying for the consumer home page creation market along with Geocities, Tripod, and a few other competitors. That’s the summer Yahoo bought Geocities for $3.5 billion (more than eBay paid for Skype many years later), and at Homestead we knew we had a better product than Geocities.

Since Homestead’s Java-based site building applet didn’t work on the Mac, I asked question after question on Apple’s mrj-dev mailing list as I tried to make it work and by October or so I decided that I’d just ask Apple if I could work there so I could fix all of the problems I was hitting. I sent a note to Jens Alfke, who was the tech lead of Apple’s Java team at the time, and a few interviews later I’d taken a job as a Java intern for the following summer. That internship led me to .NET and Rotor at Microsoft, which led me to the Intel team at Apple, which led me to the iPhone. If not for that summer at Homestead I’m sure I’d be doing something else today.

Meanwhile, Homestead grew to 200 people or so at the height of the dot-com boom, then shrunk rather dramatically when everything collapsed. Many of the core employees stayed there throughout, though, and the company survived. Their focus narrowed from general consumers to small businesses, but the core philosophy was the same — provide tools to make the power of the Web available to folks who don’t want to worry about the details of how Web pages are implemented.

Two weeks ago, Homestead agreed to be purchased by Intuit for $170 million. It’s obviously a far cry from Yahoo’s price for Geocities, but knowing Homestead, it’s much more about the fit than the price. The Homestead folks are very excited about it. My congratulations to all of them — Justin Kitch; David Wu, whose CD from his time in Occam’s Razor I still listen to; Thai Bui; John Tokash; Mona Bergevin; and any others who are still there from those halcyon summer days of 1999. They’ve worked incredibly hard for a very long time, and it’s great to see it turn out so well.