One of my first projects as an intern was to implement a feature we call Customer Images. The project took a while, partly because it was a new and unfamiliar codebase to myself, partly because the technology didn’t want to play nicely, and partly because some other unforeseeable issues came up. Nonetheless, when the first image came in, I remember everyone in the office being pretty excited. Here it is:

Actually, that image came from Jim in the office, taken on a sub-par camera phone for a mousepad
on Allsop. No shame in bootstrapping the feature, right? That was August of 2006. By now, thousands of customer images have come in, and I’ve graduated from intern status. Fortunately, I will admit that all of the images look better than Jim’s hand in the first customer image. Here’s a recent example from a review on the Nikon D200:

We’d love for you to try out the feature yourself. Perhaps you already own a product from one of the following popular retailers that use Customer Images. If so, share your experience with the product by writing a review and be sure to attach an image while you’re at it!

• Adorama
• Netshops
• Evogear
• Ritz Interactive

So how DOES the sausage get made here at Buzzillions?

(First of all, we AVOID as many Web 1.0 lame-isms as possible but you never know when an 800 pound Gorilla reference is going to delight the noobie who’s still sending his friends joke emails.)

Okay back to tech talk…so we go for the “best of breed” approach and generally operate on the bleeding edge. Why not choose the tried and true tech of yesteryear? Well, using the right combo of stable open source and innovative enterprise software gives us a legion of low-cost outsourced programmers. Why reinvent the wheel? (…when you can just use other people’s cliches…)

Whoever said “Work smarter not harder” clearly did NOT work at a startup.

When you’ve got to work harder AND smarter, you want the best tools at your disposal and you want to dispose of the tools that don’t cut the mustard. We buy some tools (e.g., Jira, Intellij, Endeca) and use open source for others (e.g., Hibernate, EHCache, Apache, Tomcat, Spring).

We even tested three wikis for a month until we chose the one we wanted to use (Twiki). There were several Wikis that didn’t even support attachments…weird. As for why wikis have two search boxes…well, that’s a mystery for the ages.

If you add in the individual productivity tools such as Excel, Powerpoint - does it really boost productivity :), SnagIt, Google Docs, Mind Manager and others, the list of tech becomes staggering.

Stay tuned and we here at Buzzillions will open the hood so you can learn from our mistakes and in turn share your insights with us.

Can you add to this list of Web 1.0 lame-isms?

“800 pound gorilla” - I later found out that a VERY LARGE gorilla is generally 550 pounds so if you’re the 800 pound gorilla you can really kick butt (unless you’re slow or dumb I guess)

“how the sausage gets made”- I researched this and wish I hadn’t

“dog and pony show” - many dotcom road shows were just a substantive

who’s got more of these?

Any website worth their salt in engineering power has its labs section and Buzzillions is no different.

Buzzillions Labs is where the engineers get to play. A lot times we have great ideas but they’re untested. Or it’s so far out there that we’re not sure our core users are ready for them. This is a place where we can try out new stuff, no matter how crazy. Maybe they’ll be perfected and added to the main site. Maybe they won’t. But it’s always a fun place.

Check it out.