Frank @ Work

I used to work at a company named Sunflower Broadband, located in Lawrence, KS and owned by the company that originally created Django the Lawrence Journal-World. People sometimes wonder why I never migrated to a coast or one of the larger tech hub cities, but in many ways Lawrence WAS one of those cities.

Lawrence was the second city in the United States to offer cable modems way back in 1996. Django came from Lawrence. As did large impactful projects like ReadTheDocs.

While there we built one of the early CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System) provisioning systems. Entirely with Perl, a customized DHCP server, and other bits of Open Source. It provided much better reliablity and features than any of the very few commercial options on offer at the time.

I also innovated a way to shard email hosting for our 40+k email accounts using off the shelf Open Source such as Sendmail and Dovecot. This allowed us to provide POP3/IMAP email services to our customers spread across commodity hardware without sacrificing performance. This technique was eventually written up in the now defunct SysAdmin Magazine.

We also were one of the first Cable ISPs to implement bandwidth based billing, a technique we used to help keep our costs and pricing lower for the 95+% of users who weren't trying to archive all of Usenet.

And I'm probably forgetting about a half dozen other interesting projects I was fortunuate enough to be a part of. Between these and bouncing around to help the companies other business units in print publishing, online publishing, and broadcast TV I often joke the experience was like getting a Master's Degree in consulting.