About eight years ago, I was selling a text editor called Texturizer on the texturizer.net domain. What few people knew was that this domain was never owned by myself, but by Anthony Bowersox, who ran an early startup company that had access to a server with plenty of bandwidth. At that time, having a dedicated domain name for my relatively successful shareware program was huge for me, and I was very thankful that Anthony purchased texturizer.net.

After about two years of active development, I started to get more interested in software development in general, and open source in particular. I quickly got involved with Mozilla and decided to create a simple website for Firefox (then called Phoenix), which was hosted on texturizer.net/phoenix. The rest is history.

The reason why I bring this up today is because I was pinged this morning by Adam Barlam, the server administrator who helped me a lot with the hosting of Firefox Help. For example, during the release of Firefox 0.9, the server host was having serious bandwidth and performance issues and we had to take out some of the heavier PHP code and add caching mechanisms to survive — just like we do today with SUMO by the way. :) If it wasn’t for Adam, the server would have suffered from frequent outages, as the Firefox project quickly became incredibly popular compared to the bandwidth and server resources texturizer.net was equipped with.

It’s always nice to catch up with people you’ve known for ages, so I was excited to hear from Adam this morning. Apparently, he is now the owner of a company called Barlam Enterprises, who among other things create web sites and offer IT services for other companies. As a testament that he still knows what he’s doing, in just five minutes he fixed an issue I had for a long time with the RSS feed of my blog!

Adam, thank you for helping me and Mozilla host the early Firefox support documentation, and for fixing my RSS today! :)