Meet a geek: Harper Reed

Harper Reed is an engineer and architect living and working in Chicago,IL. When he is not working, you can find him blogging, yo-yoing, juggling, hacking random Internet apps and going out.

Davor: When did you first realize that you like developing software?

Harper: Wow. I don’t know when i first realized that building software was for me. My first experience creating software was on an Apple II back in the day. I remember working out of the 3.2.1 Contact magazine to learn basic. My brother and I would then build silly games in the
built in basic interpretor. It was awesome. That experience stayed with me – being able to craft from nothing other than your mind’s eye, and then being able to interact with your creation. From there it was all downhill.

I spend a LOT of time developing for fun. I feel like i have a certain quota of technology per day that i must fulfill to maintain happiness. Being in a technology job, I fulfill a lot of that quote at work. However, a fair amount of my day is spent doing management tasks or mundane systems work. So, at the end of a work day I have a lot left of my “technology quota,” so, i take all that excess energy and turn it into things like excla.im, fukung,net (nsfw) or chicago.transitapi.com.

Davor: You work for “Skinny Corp”, can you tell me what exactly you do?

Harper: I am the CTO of skinnyCorp/Threadless.com. That basically means i get to make sure that shirts can be purchased, products can be shipped and people can hang out on our sites. The best part about being at threadless is the people. From the founder (Jake Nickell) to the warehouse employee, I work with an amazing set of people – and thus have a great time at work.

Lately we have been working on growing our sites and making sure that we can maintain flexibility as our product line grows. Ecommerce is always more difficult than it seems at first. The fun and often sloppy parts of social software engineering (taking advantage of slave lag, stale content, asynchronous updates, etc) are not as successful when you are dealing with less slippery things like inventory and transactions. The balance between the social software scaling and the ecommerce scaling makes for an interesting architecture.

Davor: Do you tend to change jobs or do you stick with one company?

Harper: I am very much a product person. I like to work for one place and really rock it. I have a lot of friends that do client work, or work for a new startup every few days – but that life is not for me. At threadless – i have had the opportunity to come in and help the company grow. I have been here 3.ish years and am very happy. I prefer to find that happiness and stability in a product i can believe in.

With that said – i think there is a place in technology (especially startups) for people that bounce around helping startups grow. The particular friend i am thinking of has a really awesome gig where he just hangs out and makes a startup happen, then as soon as it is successful or can run on its own – he jumps to the next one. That seems awesome, it is just not for me.

Davor: I have to ask this, PC or Mac?

Harper: I am both. One of the things we try and practice at skinnycorp is technology agnosticism. We don’t want to force someone to use a platform that they are not productive on. I actively practice this approach for my personal computing. At work I rock ubuntu on the desktop, although i have a imac for my calendar and monitoring (also a bit of iphone dev). At home, i have a ubuntu laptop, a windows work laptop and a recently acquired macbook air. I prefer the mac for the day to day stuff – but for development i really like linux. Windows is such a pain – but it is sometimes the straightest path.

Davor: What is your favorite piece of an open-source software and why?

Harper: This is a great question. It seems to me that there are two parts to this question (1) Which software have i used the most and (2) Which software do i enjoy the most.

The first part is easy:

Firefox – I use the HELL out of firefox.
Mysql – It powers the HELL out my applications.
VIM – It is the editor that has chosen me.
Python – Python made me super exited to program again.
Apache – This powers all my webapps.

The second part is harder – because the answer is so time sensitive. I can’t help but answer relative to my current interests. So here goes:

Nethack – a fun game that spawned a LOT of interaction.
Ejabberd – Erlang is a mystery and XMPP is a love. I have had a LOT of fun recently hacking the hell out of this world.
Python – once again – this made me excited about programming again.

Davor: I really like your “Mini Hi-Fi” project, are you planning to do more DIY stuff in the future?

Harper: I imagine i will continue to do more and more DIY stuff. I am constantly tinkering. I just need to make sure that i blog about it. The last couple things i did i haven’t blog about. I built out one the Peggy 2.0 boards to make a text scrolling sign. The inspiration was a friend who did a “leftro” demo on one (http://ledtro.ducker.org). I want to mount it on a wall and have it be twitterable. I have all the pieces – just need to do it. I am also into quite a bit of audio hacking right now. I purchased a Beagle Board to build out a DIY digital audio player. I wanted something that was easy to use, flac playable and under $200.

Both of these projects are waiting for me to get a new order of time in from amazon. I signed up for prime, so i should be some time in tomorrow (free shipping).

Davor: I know that you are on Twitter, but why aren’t you using Pownce?

Harper: I have a hard time getting into multiple status/microblogging sites. I like the idea of pownce better – files, images, public/private. etc – but twitter has my friends and twitter has the community. Once we all figure out the federation of these status/microblogging platforms, you will see a LOT more of me on pownce.

Davor: Can you tell me more about Exclaim – the Jabber bot?

Harper: I wrote excla.im while bored and wishing i had a jabber bot to update twitter. For me – twitter isn’t as usable without casual interaction. I don’t want to interupt my work flow to check out a site – or check out an app like twirl. I want to be able to have twitter ping me. not me ping twitter. After twitter killed its xmpp bot, i decided to build my own. I created a bunch of scripts to hook twitter into IRC, and to hook twitter into some things – so making the posting part of the bot was easy. The hard part was getting the bot to stay up and connected to the internet. I used sleekxmpp and then an awesome daemonizing script to work this out. Once that was done – i showed some peeps at work and they expressed an interest in using it. So i decided to build a webapp front end. I am in love with the app engine platform, so i choose to use that as my base app. It is super easy. I whipped up the app to store credentials and pass them to the bot when someone updates twitter. And thus excla.im. It is my frist widely used python app. It hasn’t really been down since i launched it. The daemonizing was awesome and a decent challenge.

There is a more thorough write up on my blog: http://www.nata2.org/2008/07/13/exclaim-a-replacement-jabber-bot/

Davor: Do you own an iPhone?

Harper: Yes. a 4g first gen on tmobile. I don’t listen to music on my phone and i hate att. I used to be addicted to symbian. I would buy every nokia device that was out. i had a great time spending 500 bucks on a new phone every 4-6 months. It was nice to always have the hot phone, but the devices never worked how i wanted it. The iphone out of the box works closer to how i picture my mobile experience.

There are still a bundle of annoyances and i don’t agree with apples platform choices (appstore for the lose) – but overall it just works. My wife has the same phone and uses it just as well as i do. With that said – i just ordered a G1 (the google phone). lets see how it works out.

Davor: Is there something that I did not ask you that you’d like to share with the readers?

Harper: I think a couple things that i like to talk about a lot are:

A) Make sure you are doing what you want to do. If you have a startup, or an idea, or a job and you hate it – then WHY are you doing it. If you are attempting to start something that you don’t believe in – then WHY are you starting it. I have met many founders, entrepreneurs, technologists who are doing things that they don’t believe in. I find this asinine. Just make a product for YOU. and you will be happy and successful.

B) Trust your users. Often when we at threadless are invited to speak – we talk how threadless trusts its users to maintain a huge portion of our business. This often BLOWS the minds of various business types that are in the audience. I can’t explain enough how powerful your users are. They are there to help you. Empower them to be able to help you. Don’t be scared.

C) Vote for Obama.

D) Listen to more punk rock.

Haper: That is it. Thanks for inviting me to answer these questions.

Davor: It has been a pleasure.

More about Harper Reed at: http://www.nata2.org

All material published with exclusive permission.