Subscribe to PostsMy name is Rick Baker. Nobody would ever be able to find me by searching on the internet for my name because everyone ends up at the “famous” Rick Baker that does makeup in Hollywood, I’m just a blip on the map. Anyways, I’m 38 and married with 3 kids that keep me busy when I’m not plugging away on the keyboard. I graduated from Weatherwax High School in Aberdeen, Washington in 1987. Spent the better part of 10 miserable years working in a shake mill until I was finally able to get out.
Now, I have 2 full time jobs. My primary day job is working for a company called Techtell, Inc.. We provide Network Monitoring for a variety of companies with Unicef being one of our larger customers. I fill a variety of roles here including website, php and router work and I’ve been with them somewhere around 12 years now.
My second job which takes an equal amount of my time is working on UBB.threads. I’ve been at this for roughly 10 years and this is where I’ll give a bit of it’s history. Originally my job at Techtell was working on the ISP side of things. My main job was provding services to our dialup customers. One thing we didn’t have was a discussion board for our users. I tried a variety of what was available at the time, wwwboard, some early Microsoft Front Page thing, and a couple others and they all were miserable to keep running. It was at that point I decided to write my own.
WWWThreads 1.0 was born somewhere in late 1997. It was written in Perl using flat text files, pretty much looking like the early wwwboard implementations. Version 2.0 I was using berkeley dbm files for storage. There are still some sites running version 2.7 and you can find the software in Sunsite’s archive.
In early 99, the flat file structure just wasn’t cutting it anymore. Our ISP forums were very busy and it just couldn’t keep up. So, I pretty much scrapped everything and rewrote from the ground up, still using Perl but this time using MySQL for the data storage. At this point there was a pretty big interest from others that wanted to download the software and run it themselves, so I put a GPL license on it and continued to develop it as I had time. Eventually around version 3.4 or 3.5 I was spending ALL of my free time working on it so I decided to take it commercial. This caused a huge uproar but eventually the dust settled and things were going pretty well.
I was still plugging away using Perl for several years when the requests for a PHP version started coming. So when 5.2 was released it was released in both a Perl and PHP version. I maintained both for quite awhile but it was extremely difficult. Some features were easy to port from one to another, while others were nearly impossible. Things were still going pretty well, but my spare time was null. I was doing all of the sales orders, all of the support, all of the development while still having my day job.
In the latter half of 2001 I was contacted by Infopop, now Groupee, about them aquiring the software while I continued to develop it. Even though it caused a huge uproar, this was a fairly easy decision, since at the time I was just about ready to retire WWWthreads as it just consumed all of my spare time and killed my family life. They did the majority of the support, handled the sales, etc. while I just developed. We scrapped the Perl version since they already had UBB.classic, previously known as just UBB or Ultimate Bulletin Board, and I just concentrated on the PHP version which is still being developed on a daily basis.
