The Engineers Behind Yahoo!’s Panama
I was very happy to hear that my old friends at Yahoo! have started the Panama migration process.
Sure, there are bound to be glitches, but given what Yahoo! is trying to accomplish the preliminary results have been excellent. One of the reasons why Panama is going smoothly (and perhaps the groundbreaking Yahoo! Pipes?) must be people like David Henke and David Ku. I worked for the two Davids while I was at Yahoo! and these guys are first class engineers and leaders. The Davids, along with Brian Acton, literally worked day and night driving their teams in Sunnyvale and Burbank to bring Panama from concept to reality. I’m sure Zod threw the David’s and the entire Panama engineering team a big party.
Managing a project as big as Panama is always a nightmare (ask Bill Gates about Vista). The Yahoo! strategy involved pushing down accountability and empowering the individual contributors in a way that created tremendous agility. I remember the meeting when we realized that more resources were required for Panama to make our dates. Zod and the Davids mobilized an army of engineers to help out in Burbank starting later than same week!
The delay of Panama that so worried investors was not due to lack of resolve or resources or budget. In every software project of any reasonable size there are unforeseeable consequences created by the complexity of all the moving parts. I’m sure once the migration is completed and the bugs worked out Yahoo!’s Panama will make for some very happy investors, publishers, and advertisers.
And that’s what Panama is all about: Improving the equation between publishers and advertisers. Panama improves Yahoo’s network so that ads more likely to be clicked show up on sites where users are more likely to see them. Now that I’m here at ContextWeb we’re doing the same thing—pushing the envelope even farther so that ads and pages are better matched and result in better performance for everyone in the network.
-- John Pavley
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