When I look at LinkedIn's company page as of December 2010, I can see that the company has now 1000+ employees spread all around the world.

When I started at LinkedIn, 8 years ago, there wasn't such a page to give me information about LinkedIn. LinkedIn simply did not exist. Period.

Looking back, this is the true American Dream/Silicon Valley-garage-startup deal! Of course we did not really work in a garage. We started meeting in Reid's apartment in downtown Mountain View (CA) with a handful of people. We had no office. We did not even have a name for the company (I am so glad we did not pick 'getin.com' which was on the shortlist!)

We just started from there and worked really hard. Official launch date was Cinco de Mayo 2003. The rest is history.

My most favorite projects

Throughout my career at LinkedIn, I have had the chance to work on a wide variety of projects. Here is a compilation of the ones that matter the most to me, either because they were particularly challenging or simply because they were solid building blocks on which a lot of the infrastructure was built.

• Resource framework: an easily extensible framework which hides the location of resources (files) no matter where they are located (local filesystem, in a local jar file, in a remote jar file, within the servlet context, on the classpath, in multiple locations...). This framework is part of the utils-misc open source effort. #java
• jsp20 / EL compiler: a highly efficient implementation of jsp20 and expression language from the ground up (uses Resource framework for easy development and centralized deployment) used at LinkedIn for generating the html. #java, #javacc, #compiler
• UI Framework: the framework used by the frontend applications to deal with forms and requests. #java
• LinkedIn Spring: built on top of Spring Framework 2.5 to support the notion of components (concept of nested beans). The core of the wiring system used at LinkedIn. #java, #spring
• GoBack framework: a framework that manages the concept of go back in a web application (after following a flow of several screens, you complete an action which brings you back to where you started, no matter where the starting point was) used on the website. #java
• Databus: a highly scalable database replication system which also offers an event based interface used for event propagation and replication in LinkedIn's infrastructure. #java, #jdbc
• Cloud Server: the initial scaleable implementation of the graph engine powering LinkedIn. #java, #graph
• Search Engine: the initial scaleable implementation of the search engine powering LinkedIn. #java, #lucene
• Comm system: initial design and prototype of the comm/inbox system. #ruby
• i18n profile: a massive effort to handle extensible profiles and internationalization. #java, #i18n
• Authentication server: design and implementation of the authentication server used for security at LinkedIn. #java, #security
• Payment System: initial design and implementation of the payment system which processes the credit card transactions. #java, #jms, #castor
• OSGi investigations: investigations and prototyping of an OSGi based infrastructure. #osgi
• Media server: design of the media server, the server which processes and delivers the pictures (and other media) on the website. #java
• glu: the deployment automation platform used at LinkedIn to provision (efficiently and in parallel) the services on multiple data centers that comprise the LinkedIn system. This project is now open source. #java, #groovy, #rest, #zookeeper, #grails, #devops
• and many many more...

Conclusion

A friend of mine was pointing out that I am no longer a LinkedIn employee, but I will always remain a LinkedIn co-founder, associated for the rest of my life to this amazing experience. I am extremely grateful to all the people that were (and still are) involved in this dream, because without them, it would not have been possible.