How Did Rewriting an Encrypted Job Application in Two Weeks in January 2004 Start Years of Work on .mp?

On IndieRails, Anthony Eden says the story that got Anthony Eden into .mp began on New Year's Day in January 2004, when somebody in Hawaii reached out. Eden cannot remember whether the contact was an email or a phone call, and Eden thinks it might have been email. The caller had a job application somebody had built, then encrypted all of the code, took the key, and tried to extort money to give the code back.

The caller asked Eden to reverse engineer the application and recover the code. Eden said encrypted code like that is pretty much lost, then asked for a couple of weeks to look. Two weeks later Eden reported that the code could not be broken into, so Eden rewrote the job application. The caller hired Eden and told Eden to come out to Hawaii. Eden says the hire was the start of working on .mp for the next few years, because Eden was able to do the rewrite quickly.

Eden calls the rush a common theme. Eden gets inspired to do something and then hacks it out. Often it does not work at all, but sometimes it works really well.