ThinkGeek 씽크기크 소개

재미난 물건들을 파는 띵크기크. 이 회사가 대체 뭐하는 회사인지 궁금해져서 홈페이지의 회사소개를 클릭해 보니, 회사 소개 역시 재미있다. 처음에는 ISP 회사를 시작했으나 심심해서 리눅스 관련 상품을 온라인으로 파는 사업을 사이드로 시작했다고 한다. 지금은 저가 중국제와 티셔츠, 스티커 만들기가 쉬워져서 크게 어필하지는 않지만 그래도 재미있고, 키덜트 들을 위해서 혹은 장난스런 선물용으로 적당한 제품이 많다.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/

What's The Deal With This Whole ThinkGeek Thingy?


ThinkGeek started as an idea. A simple idea to create and sell stuff that would appeal to the thousands of people out there who were on the front line and in the trenches as the Internet was forged. From programmers, engineers, students, lovers of open source, to the masses that helped create the behind-the-scenes Internet culture. ThinkGeek started as a way to serve a market that was passionate about technology. Three out of the four founding members started an ISP in the Northern Virginia area way way back in 1995. We couldn't afford Solaris, learned about a free UNIX-like OS, and spent almost an entire day downloading it onto over 50 floppies for installation on an old 486 laptop with no cd-rom (thanks Slackware!). After a few years with the ISP gig, the ThinkGeek idea popped into our heads, and, operating out of a spare room at the ISP office we setup shop and launched the site on Friday the 13th, 1999...

A month or so later we were Slashdotted. Promptly thereafter, ThinkGeek was acquired by the good folks at Andover.Net who through an acquisition and a couple of name changes, is now known as SourceForge, Inc. So we're part of a cool gaggle of sites including slashdot.org, sourceforge.net, linux.com, and freshmeat.net. Pretty nice company to be amongst, eh? We're pretty proud of it!

All the founding members are still in town, and we've continued to grow our product line, expand our staff (including several canines) and enhance the way we interface with customers. Who would have thought...


Who Are The Folks That Work @ ThinkGeek?


Well, despite our inane hatred of profiles, we link below to the ThinkGeek staff. Below are childhood pics and adult profiles of scott, willie, and jen, (the original founders) jenvon, ty, chris m, janel, caroline, mark, jenk, andrea, fraize, jacob, regan, and rob p. They follow in ascending order of random, from the top:
Jen F. Wille Scott JenVon Ty
Chris M Janel Caroline Mark Jenk
Andrea Fraize Jacob Regan Rob P

Dogs!?!? You guys have Dogs at the office?


Yep, Two Of Them. Dogs are great deterrents against solicitors. At ThinkGeek we've got a great NO SOLICITING SIGN on our front door (download your own pdf copy!). But the arrogance of the modern day solicitor is quite unnerving. Dogs can help as a backup. They also provide emotional release during 'puppy play sessions' that occur promptly at 4:30pm each day. In order of appearance and dysfunctional behavior they are Cisco (border collie mix) and Dulcie (shepherd/lab mix). You can check out their profiles right here:
Cisco Dulcie


Does ThinkGeek Have Webcams At Its Office?


Do Perl Coders Drink Caffeine? Of course they do. Sheesh. Check out the cams right now. That's an order monkey.


What Kind Of Software Does ThinkGeek Run?


ThinkGeek runs a homegrown system developed primarily in Perl, all written by one of our founders (Jon), and maintained by our resident code monkeys (Buddy and Jacob). Requests are served up through a heavily customized combination of Apache, mod_perl and mod_ssl. The actual pages served to visiting web browsers are handled by our custom Apache modules that take over the entire content request/response phases of Apache, allowing us to make use of caching and load balancing features of our software. We get a pretty good amount of traffic, so your average setup just won't do for us--heck, we can survive a Slashdotting (though, we weren't always able to). All of our production servers run RedHat Linux (but transitioning to Centos); our development servers are all Gentoo.

The front-end of the site is designed and implemented by Jen, using HTML templates that interface with Jon's (and Buddy's, and Jacob's) magic Perl. All of the templates (and the occassional non-templated pages) are written from scratch in HTML and a bit of Template Toolkit (no icky WYSWIG editors here!), and for the most part we stick to the 4.01 Transitional standard. We rely quite a bit on stylesheets, but not so much as to break too many browsers. We opted for a balance between forward-thinking design and support for 4.x browsers. There's a few browsers that look a little funky, but we did our best to make the site usable in as many browsers as we could get our hands on! Also, we have to give thanks to the Photoshop and Wacom Gods who helped Jen along the way.

Our WarpSpeed checkout is based off the AJAX web application framework OpenThought developed by Eric Andreychek. Eric was invaluable with his extensive assistance, debugging, and consultation during our development of the new checkout applications. Thanks again, Eric, for responding to all those late night messages!


What Kind Of Hardware Is ThinkGeek Using?


ThinkGeek utilizes seven frontend servers with dual processors for serving content to our customers, and a single dual processor webserver for backend administrative tasks. We also run three quad Xeon processor Linux boxes for our database servers. A few miscellaneous servers exist to do various testing and to stage content before going live on the site. There are dedicated firewalls (mixture of Linux and OpenBSD boxes) in front of all our servers (duh). We also share a 1.6TB SAN with other OSDN websites for near-line backups. ThinkGeek has access to dual 100 Mbps pipes served from the West Coast.