We were all doing physics before Octopart so we were pretty comfortable in a unix environment. I took a class in C as a sophomore in college and Sam took the same class in Java. When we decided we were going to start a company I had never heard of MySQL and when we launched we didn't know how to write a single line of javascript. Our core search engine is written in C++ so we've had to learn quite a bit more than traditional web programming as well.