We were saddened to learn of the passing of the founder of Scary Mommy, Jill Smokler, after her courageous battle with glioblastoma. She was only 48.
Long before “creator” became a job title and before every media company wanted to buy an authentic online community Jill built one from scratch. She created a place where millions of parents felt comfortable admitting that parenting could be joyful, exhausting, hilarious, and impossibly hard all at the same time. Her honesty changed the internet.
At Wave Motion Digital, we were fortunate enough to play a small part in that story.
Our own developer Phil helped bring her onboard and created the original platform including the massively popular “Confessional” where visitors could anonymously post their deepest feelings about parenting.
During Scary Mommy’s years of explosive growth, we hosted the site as it transformed from a successful blog into one of the largest parenting communities on the web. At its peak on our infrastructure, the site was pushing roughly 20 terabytes of traffic every month which is a remarkable amount for an independent publisher back then.
It also pushed and challenged us technically.
Scary Mommy became the first customer that truly forced us to think differently about scale. We built what became our first hosting cluster because a single server simply could not handle the popularity. Many of the lessons we learned supporting Jill’s site became the foundation for how we architect high-traffic hosting environments today.
At one point, Scary Mommy ran on a 10-server cluster consisting of dedicated load balancers, web servers, database servers, and application servers. By today’s standards, the hardware was modest with machines measured in megahertz and gigabytes rather than terahertz and terabytes. But it was enough to support one of the fastest-growing communities on the internet. Jill understood the technical challenges that came with that growth, and there were more than a few late nights spent together making sure the site remained online and responsive for her audience.
Every traffic spike represented another audience she had connected with, and she never lost sight of the people behind those numbers.
Like many independent creators, Jill eventually sold her company to a larger media organization. That is just the natural path for many successful businesses, even if it isn’t always easy. Our professional relationship ended, but our personal one didn’t.
Over the years, Jill and I stayed in touch. She remained exactly as people knew her: candid, funny, refreshingly honest, and remarkably down to earth despite everything she had accomplished. She had a passion for engaging her audience and she knew how to do it through her blogs and podcasts.
When she publicly shared her cancer diagnosis, she faced it with the same authenticity that had made Scary Mommy such an important voice. She refused to pretend everything was fine simply because people expected optimism. That honesty, whether she was writing about motherhood or illness, was who she was.
The internet has changed dramatically since the early days of blogging. Corporate media has replaced much of what made those communities feel personal. But for a time, Jill built something special that made millions of people feel a little less alone.
I am eternally grateful that Wave Motion Digital had the opportunity to help support that journey.
Rest in peace, Jill. Thank you for trusting us during one of the most exciting chapters in your remarkable career.
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Photo by Sebastien Gabriel on Unsplash