Meet Chris Holmok
Former Internet Rockstar
Chris Holmok is a Senior Software Engineer in our Austin, TX office. He was the first engineer hired in the Austin office and has been pinnacle in teaching those hired since all about Granify and how we operate. This is his story.
The year was 1979 and a young Chris Holmok was getting his first experience with coding. “Our school got a bunch of computers and instead of going out for recess they asked the kids that were good at math to go and see if they could make the computers ‘do stuff’”. It took some tinkering around, but the kids figured out pretty quickly how to use these computers for fun. This was back when you had to type in lines and lines of code in order to play a game, copying it from a book or magazine you bought (at an actual store) because just “Googling” it was far from being a thing!
“Hunt the Wumpus” was a popular game choice where you would type in code to create your game and then adventure through caverns using only a text-based interface. Of course this created the opportunity to adjust the code to make the game say mildly inappropriate things, as any kid would. The thing you found when you walked around the corner didn’t have to be just a super bat or a pit for these go-getters.
At that time, if you wanted to save the code for a game it would be on an audio tape as the code could be translated to and from an audio sound (so neat!). Remember dial up internet? That sound you heard when you picked up the phone? That was what the audio of data on the phone, that same audio could be recorded to tapes to save data. So Chris and his friends kept many blank audio tapes around so they could save games, trade, and come back to their adventures at a later time.
Chris’s love of computers didn’t stop there.
He went to computer camp between grade 5 and 6 at the Ohio State University, and his parents soon got him his own computer at home, a Commodore 64. On which he created music, and even started his own failed game company with friends and attempted to sell games on floppy disks.
Throughout his childhood, Chris was always finding ways to try and make some money including being a “Handy Boy” doing odd jobs like cutting grass and fixing things around his neighbourhood and even printed out his own advertisement on that Commodore 64. Perhaps he missed his true calling of being a salesman (we’re pretty glad he took the technology route).
After returning from the Navy post-high school, Chris dove into the BBS (bulletin board system) world to see what that was all about. At that time, connecting remotely involved calling into other people’s computers to do something or write a message, still before the internet was what it is now. He decided to join them and see what was new in the world of technology, at the time not knowing what he would get himself into.
At a point some time after this, he was just kind of “putzing around” working on little projects here and there, until his dad, who was working for SItel at the time, gave him a few projects to do them. He was successful in this and they saw his potential, as Chris went on to work for SItel writing software for an industrial machine for engraving everything from logos to serial numbers onto products.
While working for his dad, the internet began to take off and Chris started working on a little something of his own: fuali.com. The site hosted what is more or less a very very early prototype of the modern Buzzfeed quiz. One of his first tests was a “Punk Rock Test” — 25 yes or no questions that would determine how Punk Rock you are! Other tests included a “Video Game Addicts Test”, “White Trash Test” and “Hippie Test”. The site would then bring up an HTML snippet that had a badge and image that you could post on your LiveJournal (the Facebook before Facebook, MySpace and Friendster) so all of your friends could see your results.
The traffic become so overwhelming when he originally launched the site from his own computer, that the site went down three days after launching it without Chris even knowing it. He was out of town and went to show a friend the site, but it had crashed. Turns out his home server and network couldn’t handle the mass number of people trying to access the site!
These tests got so big that Chris had to hop around on hosts because he was using too much bandwidth. At it’s peak, the page was averaging 1 million test badges served and 10,000 tests taken every day! With all those page views and backlinks to fuali.com from the badges, it made fuali.com show up at the top of many Google searches. This only helped in it popularity.
“Before SEO was a thing, I was the king of SEO”
While Chris was interviewing for a job at MySpace, they found out that he was fuali.com. It makes perfect sense that they would want someone working for them who had the potential to drive traffic the way he did. Chris had more engineering jobs after leaving MySpace, always bringing expertise and a flair of his own to everything he does.
While at RetailMeNot he did some pretty awesome work such as build an analytics and data tool that eventually replaced Omniture and Google Analytics for web and mobile analytics. He also once did tech talks at Ivy League and leading computer science schools. While at Brown, Chris had recalls a moment of realization that the students he was talking to had “probably never used a coupon in their lives”.
Today Chris spends his days building and improving our product at Granify and his free time looking for the best spot for a great cocktail and/or cigar in Austin. He also enjoys photography, cooking, and devouring tv shows and movies. Like the days on his Commodore 64, he has even tried his hand at making music again, which he calls “really bad electronic music”. As long as it doesn’t sound like the saved data of the computer games saved on audio tape, I’m sure it’s great…or maybe that’s music to an engineer’s ears.
Does Chris sound like someone you’d like to work with? Check out our Careers page!
