Amazon Hacks

Contributors

The following people contributed their hacks, writing, and inspiration to this book:

• Tim Allwine is a Senior Software Engineer at O’Reilly & Associates. He develops software for the Market Research group, various spidering tools that collect data from disparate sites (including Amazon.com), and is involved in the development of web services at O’Reilly.

• Jeff Barr handles web services evangelism and developer relations for Amazon.com. In his spare time he collects RSS newsfeeds at http://www.syndic8.com. He’s happily married and the father of five, including a second-generation hacker.

• Erik Benson is the Technical Program Manager of Personalized Merchandising at Amazon.com. He runs allconsuming.net (http://www.allconsuming.net/) and has a weblog at erikbenson.com (http://www.erikbenson.com/).

• Duke Bhuphaibool studied Fine Arts in preparation for the grueling rigors of Amazon.com web development. He, his lovely wife, and their five rambunctious golden retrievers enjoy daily tea in the shade of their home, Plum Cottage. Duke is currently trying to figure out the difference between a bamboo flute and a back scratcher.

• Bruce Bracken works as a Lead Web Development Engineer in the Search & Browse group at Amazon.com. After collegiate studies in English and Computer Science, he joined the ranks of Amazon.com to further his exploration of search and browse technologies. He co-founded the JavaScript advisory group to help standardize JavaScript use on Amazon.com. Bruce also took eighth place in a Mellow Yellow drinking contest when he was seven.

• James Crowley turned to web development after failing in the high-risk, low-reward field of medieval manuscript study. After completing graduate school he decided that he would much prefer the task of helping people find what they want to buy on the Internet. He is happily married and the proud owner of a lot of books.

• Joanna Daneman is a baby boomer, grew up in Pennsylvania, and attended the University of Michigan. She works in the biotech field and lives in Delaware. Her hobbies are reading, listening to and playing music, and knitting. She also happens to be an Amazon Top Reviewer.

• Rael Dornfest (http://www.raelity.org) assesses, experiments, programs, writes, and edits for O’Reilly & Associates. He has edited, coauthored, and contributed to various O’Reilly books. He is program chair for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. In his copious free time, Rael develops bits and bobs of freeware, including the Blosxom weblog application (http://www.blosxom.com), and maintains his raelity bytes weblog.

• Cyrus Durgin is an Information Security Engineer and software developer at Amazon.com. He spends his spare time house-hunting in Seattle with his sweetie.

• Alf Eaton (http://www.pmbrowser.info)

• Kevin Hemenway (http://www.disobey.org), coauthor of Mac OS X Hacks, columnist for MacTech, and better known as Morbus Iff, is the creator of disobey.com, which bills itself as “content for the discontented.” Publisher and developer of more home cooking than you could ever imagine, he gets sleepy whenever he drinks merely one cup of coffee.

• Adam Kalsey (http://kalsey.com)

• Jonathan Leblang is VP of Web Services at Alexa Internet (http://www.alexa.com) and is working on integrating Alexa’s web information into the Amazon platform. Prior to Alexa, he was at Amazon for three and a half years, where he launched Wish List, Honor System, and many other site features. Before joining Alexa, Jonathan was one of Amazon.com’s first customers and a beta tester of the Amazon.com web site, where he found the infamous “negative quantity” bug (you could order a negative number of books, and Amazon would owe you money). He lives in Menlo Park, CA.

• Chris McGarel has been a Senior Software Engineer with Cape Clear (http://capescience.capeclear.com/) for three years. Prior to that, he worked as a Technical Consultant in Java and web technologies with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. Chris is also a guitarist and composer, holding a postgraduate diploma in Music Technology from Queen’s University in his native Belfast, Northern Ireland.

• Myk Melez has been working with Mozilla since 1999, when he started using it as a DHTML application platform. In 2000 he wrote ForumZilla (http://forumzilla.mozdev.org/), a weblog reader built with XUL and other Mozilla application framework technologies, and since 2001 he has worked as a web application developer for mozilla.org (http://www.mozilla.org/).

• Nelson Minar likes hacking stuff on the Internet, particularly distributed and decentralized systems. He is a software engineer at Google.

• Sean Nolan founded Software Poetry (http://www.softwarepoetry.com/), and was the Chief Technical Officer for drugstore.com, where he was the fifth employee and led the design and implementation of their award-winning e-commerce systems. While at drugstore.com, Sean was honored as one of the nation’s Premier 100 IT Leaders for 2001 by Computerworld magazine.

• Reid Philpot lives and works in London, England. He runs Exploding Fist (http://www.explodingfist.com/), a popular, award-winning weblog that focuses on new media and technology.

• Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org) is the author of Dive Into Python, a free Python book for experienced programmers, and Dive Into Accessibility, a free book on web accessibility techniques. He works for MassLight, a Washington, DC-based training and web development company where, unsurprisingly, he does training and web development. But he lives outside Raleigh, NC, because it’s warmer.

• Jim Roche has worked as a Software Test Engineer for Amazon.com for four years. Since initially joining the Auctions team, he has worked in some degree with most of the software teams in the company. His dog, Maxine, holds court on the seventh floor of the company headquarters, where she makes sure that no one is loitering unnecessarily or wasting food.

• Scott Windsor is a code monkey for Amazon.com in Seattle, WA. In his spare time he collects odd PEZ dispensers and tries to take over the world.

• Dan Wood is chief architect of Watson (http://www.karelia.com/watson).

• David Yarbrough is a Senior Systems Engineer at Amazon.com in Seattle, WA.

• Michael Yoon (http://michael.yoon.org) has worked in the software industry since 1995, most recently at ArsDigita Corporation (now part of Red Hat). He has a BA in English.