Even better, he had created a perfect place for paid dating sites to spend their huge advertising budgets
But cleaning up other people’s messes taught Frind how to quickly simplify complex code. In his spare time, he started working on a piece of software that was designed to find prime numbers in arithmetic progression. The topic, a perennial challenge in mathematics because it requires lots of computing power, had been discussed in one of his classes, and Frind thought it would be a fun way to learn how to sharpen his skills. He finished the hobby project in 2002, and, two years later, his program discovered a string of 23 prime numbers, the longest ever. (Frind’s record has since been surpassed, but not before it was cited by UCLA mathematician and Fields Medal winner Terence Tao.) “It was just a way of teaching myself something,” Frind says. “I was learning how to make the computer as fast as possible.”
By early 2003, the technology economy in Vancouver had yet to bounce back, and Frind’s sixth employer in three years was laying off half its workforce. Worried that he would again find himself unemployed, Frind decided to bolster his qualifications. He would devote a couple of weeks to mastering Microsoft’s new tool for building websites, , and do it by building the hardest kind of website he could think of. Continue reading “But it promised something that no big dating company offered: it was free”