A Geek’s Guide to the Magic behind MyFonts

People I talk to are often surprised by two things about MyFonts: the small number of people who run it, and the relatively large number of servers we use to keep the site up and running smoothly.

There are about five guys (and no girls! why is that?) who work on MyFonts full time. In all honesty, though, part of the reason we can survive on such a tight core group is that we borrow a lot of corporate resources from our parent company Bitstream. So all the things we tech geeks consider to be annoying little details (things like accounting departments) are taken care of for us.

We’re all low-grade Renaissance men, dabbling in various areas of site maintenance, although we all have our specialties:

• Two people maintain the actual servers: installing new hardware and software; keeping the database fast and accessible; and designing fancy network topologies to keep things running if any particular piece of hardware decides to die over Christmas holiday.
• Two people devote significant time to answering email support from customers, although we all field questions regularly.
• One person handles installation of new fonts and foundries into the MyFonts database.
• Several part-time specialists lend their skills to international type issues, design, foundry relations, etc.

We all occasionally try out ideas just for fun (I call these “Fun Friday Projects” because my mind tends to wander on Friday afternoons) that end up turning into indispensable site features. An example of this is the RSS feeds that Laurence threw together one weekend when he noticed that several MyFonts pages made natural RSS candidates.

Another interesting fact is that there are now no two MyFonts developers living in the same geographic area; we span the globe from Germany to California. (However, in six days I will be moving from San Diego to Japan, so our time zone range will shift from nine to 16 hours!)

Traffic to the MyFonts web site is increasing all the time, to the point that we now have over 35 servers keeping the site running, including:

• 20 web servers
• 3 database servers
• 4 font-rendering image-generating servers
• 3 WhatTheFont servers
• various administration, development, and special-purpose servers

We’re getting nervous as the servers outnumber us over five to one!

-Chris Lewis, Webmaster

Photo credits:
Left: photo of Chris Lewis at his wedding in 2005 by Adam Twardoch. Photo of MyFonts web servers by Chris Lewis. Composite by Adam Twardoch.
Right: famous photo of British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.