Yammer

Adam designed the original Newsfeed architecture and built its Ruby map/reduce core, which he called Skynet and later presented at RailsConf. When he transitioned to Yammer, I inherited the platform and evolved it into a highly flexible story-generation, aggregation, and localization engine.

Amos figured out the extraordinarily complex layout mechanism that allowed Geni to render a global genealogy graph containing millions of people, one family at a time. When I later needed the same capability for a mobile application, reproducing the algorithm proved so difficult that I used his API instead. His work turned a nearly intractable graph-visualization problem into reliable platform infrastructure.

Andrew convinced me to leave SOA Software and join Geni. When Yammer began inside Geni, he wrote some of the first implementations of the product across both web and mobile. He even built in a sound effect so every new Yammer message played his voice saying “Yum”—a detail I am sure disappeared later, but an unforgettable part of the earliest product.

David's vision for Geni was simple and enormous at the same time: everyone is related. That idea shaped the product and the engineering challenges behind building a global collaborative family graph. We later worked together at Yammer as another ambitious idea grew into a company of its own.

Ian designed Geni's interface, and we worked closely across features including its Facebook integration and tr8n. As a founding product engineer at Yammer, he also helped design and build much of its early front-end experience. Our collaboration connected product design, user experience, and the underlying platform.

Justin and I built tr8n together at Geni. He was also the brains behind Geni's Tree Positioning System, or TPS, creating custom graph algorithms that could perform lightning-fast searches across the global family tree. Toward the end, we explored combining TPS and tr8n so a path between any two people could become a naturally translated relationship in any language. I am not sure the experiment ever launched after we left, but it connected two of Geni's most sophisticated systems in a fascinating way.