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Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems – A famous American IT Company Currently Operating Under Oracle Corporation.

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Sun Microsystems is an American IT company that was established in 1982 and is based in California, US. The company became very famous over a short time because it created Java (programming language) whose applications are very wide in today’s IT sector. The company mainly sold computer components, IT services, software but set itself apart by rolling out products like Java, ZFS, SPARC microprocessors, VirtualBox, etc. Sun Microsystems offers a wide range of software products like the Java platform, operating system, Office Suite, database management system, etc. It also offers storage as one of its primary products as well.

About Sun Microsystems

The founders of Sun Microsystems are Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Bill Joy. Sun Microsystems is a company that has always supported open systems like Unix and contributed to open-source software. In 2008, the company acquired MySQL for $1 billion. After a year, Oracle Corporation announced that it would acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion. The company made plenty of acquisitions and expanded to Newark, Oregon, Scotland, Hillsboro, and many other places before it became a part of Oracle Corporation.

Sun Microsystems
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History Of The Company And The Dot-Com Bubble

The first Unix workstation of Sun Microsystem, Sun1 is the original idea of Andy Bechtolsheim. When he was a graduate student at Stanford University, he started working on the designs of the workstation for his communications project. He designed it using the Motorola 68000 processors and an advanced memory management unit. His first design was completely built out of what he got from his college’s computer science department and Silicon Valley supply houses. As the design of the workstation became a success, two other graduate students, Scott McNealy and Vinod Khosla from the same university joined in and founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy worked at Berkeley Software Division and joined the company soon.

In the first year of its establishment, Sun Microsystems turned out to be profitable. After four years, the company filed its first IPO under the stock symbol SUNW. This symbol was changed to JAVA in 2007 as the company became more famous as the creator of the Java platform. Soon, the situation of the dot-com bubble made an impact on every Silicon Valley business. Sun Microsystem’s business rose dramatically and the share prices as well. The company started hiring more employees and building the company until the bubble burst in 2000. None of the companies were prepared for this and thus it was followed by layoffs and cost-cutting. Sun tried its best to get to the pre-cash scenario as early as possible but had to shut down their Newark, California facility.

Post-Crash Scenario

After the bubble burst, there were changes in the strategies of Sun Microsystems. The company started focusing more on processor optimization for multi-threading and multiprocessing. In 2004, the company collaborated with Fujitsu, a Japanese business, to use their processor chips and Sun servers. Eventually, Sun Microsystems stabilized itself and in 2005 gained a net profit of $19 million. The year before it was acquired by Oracle, the value of Sun Microsystems fell from 2007 to 2008 and its valuation came down to $3 billion.

Acquisitions

Sun Microsystems has a big list of acquisitions from the year 1987 to 2009, just before Oracle acquired it. In the 1980s it acquired Transept Systems, Sitka Corp, Centrum System West, and Folio Inc. The company acquired a lot of businesses in the late 1990s. Some of them are Lighthouse Design, Encore Computer, LongView Technologies, etc. Out of all the companies it acquired, MySQL was the biggest acquisition in the company’s history. Q-Layer was the last company that it acquired before Oracle bought it off.

About The Founders

Scott McNealy is an alumni of Harvard and Stanford University. Mostly famous as co-founding Sun Microsystems, he also founded Curriki which is a free e-learning service. He founded Wayin in 2011 and served as its CEO for quite some time. In 2018, he joined the Advisory Board of Redis Labs.

Vinod Khosla is an Indian American businessman who graduated from IIT Delhi. He also went to Carnegie Mellon University followed by Stanford. Apart from Sun Microsystems, he founded Khosla Ventures. Last year, he was featured on the Forbes 400 list.

Apart from being an investor and an entrepreneur, Andy’s career started as an electrical engineer. He was very talented as a student as he graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with the help of the Fulbright Scholarship. Later, he went to Stanford to complete his Ph.D. He is also a Google investor. Before co-founding Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy worked at Fabry’s Computer Systems Research Group. He is an electrical engineer and also acquired a degree in computer science.

stack overflow

Stack Overflow : A Programming Hotspot Created for the Coding Enthusiasts

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Some people might say that the job opportunities in the IT sectors are gradually reaching a saturation level, but is it really true? Today, while the world is getting consumed by the trove of technology, IT sectors play the most important role in functioning and developing of our world. Even, if you are launching a small product in the market, you need to create certain algorithms, a website, and definitely, a user interface, for which one needs to hire developers. In this 21st century, coders are on demand! Be it a pure competitive programmer or a developer, their contributions to the IT sector is certainly the need of the hour.

And, to help out the programmers out there be it an expert or a beginner, an online Q/A platform, Stack Overflow was created 11 years ago. Stack Overflow, the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network was mainly created to answer the queries of the programmers based on any programming language, and the user can solve problems on the website as well.

The two finest minds who created this platform for every coding enthusiast out there are Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. They launched the site on 15th September 2008, eleven years from now, and today, the website witnesses over 50 million monthly visitors.

Stack Overflow Founders

About the Founders

Jeff Atwood is a software developer, who runs his own blogging site, Coding Horror, since 2004. Apart from co-founding Stack Overflow, he also launched his new company, Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., in 2013. He met Joel Spolsky after he started maintaining his programming blog.

Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer belonging to New Mexico. He maintains a blog called Joel on Software, and he is also the creator of Trello. Before founding Stack Overflow, he was a project manager of Microsoft Excel and also founded Fog Creek software.

Spolsky contacted Atwood on 2008 and together decided to set up a Q/A website related to coding.

The journey of Stack Overflow

Within months of the launch of Stack Overflow, it attracted a lot of coders from around the world, and even the beginners, who just wanted to learn something new. People helped each other by answering the doubts, learnt new things about any specific language, and even, if someone was showing off their coding skills, it worked out pretty well for the website.

Since both, the founders had their own personal blogs, they had enough number of subscribers. Atwood invited his subscribers to try the beta version of the newly released website, on 31st July 2008. And on 15 September 2008, the company announced the release of this beta version for public, where anyone could seek help and ask queries related to programming.

The website also incorporated a badge system for the users. For example, if you answered a question and your answer got upvoted you were given certain badges, that is, awards which upgraded your reputation. Thus, the more you answer, you are likely to gain certain incentives given that the quality didn’t drop.

But, it was noticed that a similar question was posted many times, giving rise to the same answers. Spolsky turned this drawback into a positive point, saying that if similar questions drove more traffic to the website, as it appeared on multiple search results, there is no harm in it after all.

The success of the website

In 2010, the company raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures. In April 2009, the company added a feature called “timed suspension” which showed the user’s reputation at “1” because either they didn’t show enough interest to improve or engaged themselves in disruptive behaviour. After implementing this policy, 92% of the questions were answered within a few minutes.

In 2011, another $12 million was raised in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with the participation of Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Another $10 million was raised in Series C funding in 2013. Till now, the company has received around $70 million in funding.

Within five years of its launch, Stack Overflow answered 5 million questions related to coding, thus making the coding community even stronger. Around forty-four million visitors checked out the website every month by 2013.

Today, around 250 employees are working for Stack Overflow, with the majority working in head offices of New York, London and Munich. Around 14 million questions have been answered so far, and the site also partners with many big companies to help them recruit developers.

Majority of the queries that are posted on the website are regarding PHP, JavaScript, Java, Python, HTML, C#, jQuery and Android.

PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf : An Insightful Programmer and the Creator of PHP

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The history of PHP programming language narrates the story of a programmer who prefers to be known as an engineer than a coder. Because according to this engineer, the end product is what matters the most and not the journey to it. Well, seems like his mind works more like a thermodynamic state function and less like a path-dependent parameter, isn’t it?

This remarkably excellent engineer is none other than world-famous programmer Rasmus Lerdorf. On one of his interviews, Lerdorf said that coding is quite boring and tedious, which is insignificant contrast to who he is and his occupation. So, let’s get to know more about this big guy and his ‘path’ to success.

Early Life

Rasmus Lerdorf
Image Source: staticflickr.com

Born into a family from Disko Island, Greenland, on 22nd November 1968, Rasmus Lerdorf moved to Denmark at an early age of three. At the age of fifteen, Lerdorf and his family moved to King City, Ontario. In 1988, Lerdorf graduated from King City Secondary School and pursued his higher studies from the University of Waterloo. He graduated from the university in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree of Applied Science in Systems Designing Engineering.

After he graduated, Lerdorf made significant contributions to the relational database management systems like Oracle Rdb.

Working With Programming Languages

When the programmers and the tech-savvies were working in the mid-90s with their main motive to make the internet more efficient and faster, he got hindered by languages like C and Perl. According to Rasmus Lerdorf, designing websites with these languages were too time consuming and needed to come up with a new one.

Lerdorf, along with some of the technical writers, assembled their ideas together and got them online as an HTML page. He wanted to take a step ahead, only when some companies asked for these documents or expand the idea and implement it in the practical world.

Creating PHP

He started working in CGI (common gateway interface), developed few libraries, wrote some programs in C, and finally, developed PHP, an entirely new language. Lerdorf created PHP (personal home page, now known as hypertext preprocessor) in 1994, and till now, many modified versions of the language has been released.

In a generalized way, PHP is a programming language that was designed for web development and can be used almost on every operating system. The most recent version of PHP is PHP 7.3 released on 6th December 2018.

After PHP became a very well known and useful language to big companies, Rasmus Lerdorf explained that he never intended to create a programming language, as he had no clue how to build one. He was making logical implementations to create something simpler than Perl, and one thing led to another. Finally, after forming a tech team to assist him with technical documentation, which followed beta testing, PHP/FI 2 was released in November 1997.

The Success

Today, PHP is a majorly used programming language, being used by websites like Etsy, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Yahoo, Flickr, Facebook, and many more.

Over the years, many features have been incorporated in PHP, but Lerdorf keeps telling one thing to every emerging engineer out there, that for a programmer, it is very important to understand C very well. Though he accepts that as compared to languages, like Python or C++, the user needs to put comparatively more effort using C, but it is the fundamental unit of learning for any programmer.

After releasing PHP, he worked with different big tech companies, and currently, he is working with Etsy.

Career of Lerdorf

In January 2000, Rasmus Lerdorf joined Linuxcare Inc. as a senior research engineer and continued for a year. In September 2002, he joined Yahoo! where he continued for seven years, as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer. Lerdorf said that eventually, he became tired and kind of demoralized working in an ad centric web company, as it involves tricking your customers.

He joined Room 77 as an advisor in 2010, and then, it’s all about WePay and Etsy. It’s been eleven years, that he has been working in Etsy, first as an advisor, and then, as a distinguished engineer.

Lerdorf as every other enthusiastic programmer is very much interested in open source, and he attends the open-source conferences as a speaker throughout the world.