Working at ESPN.com

I recently started a new job at ESPN.com. I'm what they call a "Technical Producer". It's basically a web developer, primarily focused on the front end development - engineers provide an API into the back end systems, designers provide, well, the design, and various editorial contributers provide the content elements. Producers glue it all together to make the pages you see on the site.

In my 12 years building web sites, I have become a bit of a jack of all trades. I started my career doing graphics and layout, and over time got into the programming end of things - from designing and building databases to writing the software to architecting applications, etc. I've even done a little systems administration - the hardware and software maintenance end of things.

I have always liked having some contact with all aspects of a site, so being a Producer is just the right fit for me.

There are a lot of cool things about working at ESPN. It's just nice to have the domain be something I'm interested in - in this case sports. I spent several years in the insurance industry, and no matter how much I liked the people, etc., it's still insurance that I was talking and thinking about all day, and it's just not as interesting to me as sports.

The coolest part though is working on a site that is so high profile and high traffic. According to Neilsen NetRatings, ESPN.com gets in the neighborhood of 20 million unique visitors per month.

It is safe to say that ESPN.com gets more traffic in an average month (and probably less time than that) than the combined lifetime traffic of every other site I have ever worked on. Amazing stuff.

This makes it exciting to work on for a couple of reasons. The first is just an ego thing - "holy crap, a lot of people are going to see my work". This is both really cool, and a little intimidating. I certainly take a couple of extra minutes to look over my code before I put it into production.

The second reason is from a purely geeky perspective. This type of traffic means a very specialized infrastructure to make it work. It's not just a matter of buying more servers - there is some pretty nifty technology involved in making a site like this run, and some very smart people involved in running it.

It's a cool environment, with cool people, doing cool work, and I'm more than a little excited to be a part of it.