Interviewer: Joshua Pettit
Editor's Note: Rick Baker (Scream) is the creator of WWWThreads - which became UBB.Threads after Infopop acquired. Rick is currently the lead developer of UBB.Threads.
We had a chance to chat with Rick recently, learning a little insight on the creation of Threads and it's future. Josh>> Hi Rick! Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today! How did you get your start in web software development?
Rick>> Basically it started when I got hired at a local ISP about 7-8 years ago. I was originally just hired to do some web design stuff, but I ended up writing alot of web based applications for managing our customers, tracking issues, etc.
Josh>> How did you get the idea for wwwthreads (UBB.Threads predicessor)?
Rick>> We wanted to offer a discussion forum for our customers. I installed a couple that were available at the time, which wasn't much considering that was about 7 years ago, but they just kept crashing and weren't reliable. So I decided to try writing my own. And version 1 of WWWThreads was born. I must say, usually the first version of any program doesn't have too many bright points, but the first version of WWWThreads didn't have
any bright points. It was a complete mess, but a good learning experience.
Josh>> We've all had learning experiences like that. Fun to look back on them I guess and see how far you've come. At what point did it leave freeware and become a professional (paid) product?
Rick>> At that point I'd been developing it for a couple of years already. Version 1, as I mentioned, was just a learning experience, never offered to the public (thank heavens). Version 2 ended up using Perl's DBM functionality to make things a little more reliable. This one I ended up putting up for download and I think it got up to somewhere around version 2.7 before it was finally put on the shelf.
I was starting to do some projects at work using MySQL and figured it would be perfect for a discussion board backend. So, I scrapped the whole version 2 stuff and started writing from scratch. I was working 8 hours at work and then another 8 hours at home and it got to the point that I either had to just stop development altogether or go commercial.
Josh>> I'm guessing that was a pretty rewarding moment for you, wasn't it?
Rick>> Well, after the initial round of death threats faded, yes it was
There were alot of angry people that weren't afraid to express their frustrations about the fact that I was now charging for the product. Once that settled down though it was nice to see there was still alot of interest in it as a commercial product.
Josh>> How did you meet infopop (or how did they find you)?
Rick>> Ted actually sent me an email. I think we'd both done an interview for a site and he ended up reading mine and contacted me. Since infopop was only about a 2 hour drive from where I lived it was pretty easy to get together to discuss things further.
Josh>> Did you ever imagine that wwwthreads would become what it has today?
Rick>> Not at all. I had low expectations since I had never done anything like this before and wasn't sure what to expect in the long run.
Josh>> OK - enough with all this geek stuff. Let's talk a bit about you personally. You're married right? What do you and your wife like to do in your spare time these days?
Rick>> Sleep
That's my main objective each night to get at least 5 hours of sleep. I pretty much work at a computer in some fashion throughout the entire day. When I do get time off we usually go to the beach, the local casino, or just for a drive. I also maintain my sanity by keeping up on my fish tank, my only real day to day hobby. But mainly I just sleep, which will be ever more important since the wife and I are expecting in September.
Josh>> Wow! Congratulations!! Soon there will be a little baby Baker around helping with Threads. What can we look forward to for the future of UBB.Threads? Any top secret plans for version 7?
Rick>> Nothing is set in stone at this point. We're wrapping up version 6.5 right now for public beta. We'll probably spend a good amount of our efforts on the front end in the coming versions since 6.5 mainly focused on the Control Panel.
Josh>> Well we're all looking forward to 6.5. Being a beta tester, I've been using it for a while, and the new Control Panel is top notch. I look forward to even bigger and better things in the future.
Thanks again for taking the time to speak with us today!
Rick>> Not a problem, and thank you for cutting into my sleep time.
