e Neighbors - Three Years Later

Three years ago, there was one event that still haunts me.
Three years ago, Habr helped me make eSosedi a relatively popular site.
And I want to talk a little about these three years.


sometime in 2005.
I work as a C ++ VoIP programmer.
Having succumbed to the wave that swept all our friends, we are buying an apartment in Podolsk.
House delivery is not very soon, and there are many of us. A wonderful person Dmitry Shustov convinces me to create neighbors - a project for house communication. In a couple of days the design is ready, in a few weeks the design is implemented. But something was wrong, and the project never got outside the subdirectory of one of my sites.
Another friend of mine offers to visualize the houses on the map based on the Transport Tycoon render.
What is advertising or SEO, I just do not understand.

September 2007
I work With the linux kernel \ VoIP programmer, I know what sape is, I don’t understand js at all, occasionally work as a sidekick.
MirTesen was discovered on the hub, after which I suddenly realized that there are Google maps in the world and it was decided to revive the sosedi project.
The source code of which only remained on the server.

April 1, 2008
The source code for the first version of the neighbors was posted on the server of the i-stroy.ru friendly site . Unfortunately, at this point all the domains that I looked after earlier were already taken, so after some thought, I temporarilycalled esosedi (Σsosedi).
Any operations with the site were possible only after registration, well, at least I did not think of invites that were fashionable at that time.
Attendance of 300-500 hosts per day. The predicted limit (based on niche analysis) is 5k.

Summer 2009
Sometimes in the city I see active advertising aroundme.ru.
Something gnaws at me and makes me work more actively.

August 29, 2008.
I decided to relocate the neighbors on the hub Only then did I understand that Σ reads like sigma, and in general the designer from me is not so hot.
Attendance 5k per day. The predicted limit is no more than 15k.
Youterra, telnews, several investors will be contacting me soon
The first I gave the sources and the basis for their version of the development of the situation, the second I give an interview, for which I’m ashamed a couple of years later. I don’t understand why investors are needed.

September 13, 2008.
I am on vacation in Sochi with my wife and child. For the first time in several years.
A strange network activity suddenly begins.
Articles from Habr and Telnews are replicated on the Internet.
This, apparently, gave a critical mass.
Site traffic 25k.
Sometimes, coming from the sea, we watched TV, heard about some kind of crisis.
It's time to go home. The bank that served the salary card no longer exists.
I have a wife in my hands, a one and a half year old son, 5k and a car with two broken wheels.
Three years have passed since then.

Since then, I’m not lucky - wherever I go everywhere cards alone.

October 2008
I go through the quests in the FSB and the management of K. They do not like secret objects on the map. Thanks to the work - we did not just VoIP, but VoIP for the FSB.

December 2008, the
office bursts at the seams.
I remove the registration requirement from my neighbors, replacing the guest with a captcha.
I begin to notice that most of the day I program already web, and not the main work.
As a result, on New Year's Eve, I move on to work with the wonderful guys from Wikimapia .

May 2009
Finally, hands reach to tie Yandex cards to neighbors.
I transfer the rights to manage the domain of unprofitable neighbors to the host of the servers where they are located.
The first neighbors redesign.
We are hiring a former manager ( integra ) by then already closed youterra, but what she wanted to do then I start to do just now. And then, it did not grow together.

July 2009
Immediately after the rendering of the Wikimapia tiles, I go to GdeEtotDom.ru.
An excellent company, only there I learned teamwork for the first time in 15 years of my programming life and began to reveal the secrets of our industry.
The attendance of the neighbors is 40k, no one understands why they are needed, but I continue to do something - this is no longer a habit, but a way of life.
After a little thought, I rent a captcha from operations performed by guests.
This increases the activity on the site by almost 10 times.
The calm is watched by a horde of robots.

December 2009
GDD touts GoogleMaps v3. I was instructed to redo the cards.
With the hope of someday doing backport, I make a refactor for the neighbors engine and get the cards that are now available at this house .
It is worth saying that my desire never came true, although I started rewriting the system for myself about a year ago and it has been ready for a long time , and relatively many sites already work on this system, except for the one to whom it was originally intended.
Looking through the logs of the rebound robots somehow, they are protected from spam, I am horrified by the number of rebounds and translate them into a delayed response (analysis of the time for sending comments, shingles, detecting robots through access logs)
This gives an additional + 10% to activity.

2010
Second redesign, attendance at the beginning of the year is 50k people and is growing slowly.
The whole year is busy with the birth of a second son, the main work, work on new cards.
For the sake of consistency, all users were transferred to the esosed.ru subdomains (for example, kashey.esosed.ru )
At some point, something magical happened and the income from the YAN jumped 10 times (if you count from the baseboard).
This allowed updating the server park and developing further.

December 2010
I leave GdeEtotDom and transfer to another company, and again the cards :)

spring 2011
After partial refactoring of client scripts and optimizing the reaction time, the attendance began to grow a little faster.
The main core of the system cannot be refactored and remains what it has been all this time.

June 2011
Yandex.Metrica recorded 98 thousand visitors a day.
Exactly in the middle of my vacation, the security system records an attacker’s penetration of the server.
Unknown viral js code was installed on two main sites.
From the roof of the house in the country (there is already no Internet below) I somehow find the ways of penetration and close it .

July 2011
We are moving the server to hetzner.
Due to the wrong version of glusterFS, we have been experiencing strange server failures for several weeks.
Unstable work leads to a certain drop in attendance.
Sneezing at the administrator, I figure it out myself, exactly on the day when the GlusterFS update comes out, indicating that it was our problem that was fixed in

August 2011.
In the middle of the working day, my wife calls and says that Kaspersky is cursing at the site.
And he continued to swear for almost three weeks, while I was fighting with an unknown, but undoubtedly a talented hacker.
I had to shovel 60 megabytes of source codes that had accumulated on the server over the many years of its existence.
Turn off various commands (for example, touch, with which you can change the mtime of the file, and look for changes), hang up the guard on nodejs, which monitors FS changes and even add a second authorization for administrator accounts.
Well, physically isolate all the scripts that I do not trust (for example, a forum on invision)
(Here you have to pay such a price if half of the scripts were written 5 years ago, and the administrator is a bummer, and we also want to sleep ourselves)

September 2011.
Another refactor is approaching, which will finally remove the binding from prototype.js and transfer the cards to the new system.
Attendance 70k.
In a couple of days I’m going on vacation again and again in Sochi.
The circle will end.

Update
September 18, 2011. Sochi
Yesterday we sat at the Boss’s Cottage and celebrated 7 years from the wedding day.
SMS has arrived - sites are not available.
At the database server the network card fell out.
During recovery work, someone very carefully rebooted the database server and his innoDB fell.
Everything as I was waiting

Only three years from the date of launch, but in these three years you can spend half of the life that I remember.
In three years, I turned from a C programmer at first into almost pure php, and then into a completely pure js programmer.
I managed to get a certificate from googleMaps (a piece of paper and a T-shirt, the program is currently closed), and got a chihuahua, in addition to two cats and two boys.

Despite the fact that the neighbors already bring more than the main work, they remain my hobby, which is given a maximum of two hours a day, as long as I go by train to work.
Unfortunately, despite my several attempts to attract at least one more programmer (or, dream, designer), I still work alone.

Over the years, it is clear that the original model, which was different from other projects, was chosen correctly and, as a result, the neighbors are now a cart talker, not a cartographic system.

Now the neighbors are
15 thousand registered neighbors , because registration is terrible ,
20 thousand “tweets” are not required
250 thousand comments left to various places
400 thousand different places and 350 thousand objects of the directory
and 700 thousand edits of these same places and objects.

And thanks to Habr for teaching me how to do all this, and to Yandex, who made all this possible