EU Neighbors Three Years Later

Three years ago, an event occurred that still haunts me.
Three years ago, Habr helped me make eSosedi a relatively popular site.
And about these three years I also want to tell a little.


somewhere in 2005.
I work as a C ++ VoIP programmer.
Giving in to the wave that has engulfed all our friends, we are buying an apartment in Podolsk.
Delivery at home is not very soon, and there are many of us. Wonderful man Dmitry Shustov convinces me to create neighbors - a project for home communication. After a couple of days, the design is ready, in a few weeks the design is realized. But something was wrong, and the project never got outside the subdirectory of one of my sites.
Another friend of mine offers to visualize houses on a 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 I work with websites.
At Habré MirTesen was discovered, after which I suddenly realized that there is a Google map in the world and it was decided to reanimate the project sosedi.
Sources which only remained on the server.
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April 1, 2008
The source of the first version of the neighbors was uploaded to the server of the site i-stroy.ru, which was friendly to me Unfortunately, by this time all the domains that I looked after earlier were already taken, so after some deliberation I temporarily called myself esosedi (Σsosedi).
Any operations with the site were possible only after registration, it was good to not think of fashionable invites at that time.
Attendance 300-500 hosts per day. Predicted limit (based on niche analysis) - 5k.

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

August 29, 2008.
I decided to otrelizit neighbors on Habré. Only then I realized that Σ reads like sigma, and in general the designer of me is not so hot.
Attendance 5k per day. The predicted limit is no more than 15k.
Soon youterra, telnews, several investors contact me.
I gave the first the source code and the basis for their version of the development of the situation, I give the second one an interview for which, and in a couple of years I am ashamed. I do not 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.
Suddenly a strange network activity begins.
Articles from habr and telnews are replicated on the Internet.
This, apparently, and gave a critical mass.
Site attendance 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 arms, a fifteen-month-old son, 5k and a car with two punched wheels.
Three years have passed since then.

Since then, I have not been lucky, wherever I could climb all alone cards.

October 2008.
Passing 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 is bursting at the seams.
I remove the registration requirement from the neighbors, replacing the captcha for the guests.
I begin to notice that I program the web for most of the day, and not the main work.
As a result, for the new year, I turn to work for the wonderful guys from Wikimapia .

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

July 2009
Immediately after the rendering of the Wikimapia tile render, I turn to GdeEtotDom.ru
Excellent company, only there for the first time in 15 years of my programming life I learned teamwork and began to reveal the secrets of our industry.
Attendance of neighbors 40k, no one understands why they are needed, but I continue to do something, it is no longer a habit, but a way of life.
After a little thought, captcha with operations performed by guests.
This raises the activity on the site almost 10 times.
Behind the calm watches a crowd of robots

December 2009.
On GDD GoogleMaps v3 is advertised. I was instructed to remake the cards.
With the hope of ever making a backport, I make the neighbors engine refactor and get those maps that are now available at the home office .
I should say my desire never came true, although I started rewriting the system for myself about a year ago and it is already ready for a long time , and relatively many sites already work on this system, besides who it was originally intended for.
Looking through somehow the logs of the end of robots are protected from spam, I am terrified by the number of rebounds and translate them into deferred triggering (analysis of the time for sending comments, shingles, detection of robots via accessors)
This gives an additional + 10% to activity.

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

December 2010.
I leave GedEtotDom and turn to another company, and again the card :)

spring of 2011
After partial refactoring of client scripts and optimized reaction times, attendance began to grow slightly faster.
The main core of the system does not give in to refactoring and remains what it has been all this time.

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

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

August 2011
In the middle of the day the wife calls and says that Kaspersky is swearing at the site.
And he continued to swear for almost three weeks, while I fought with an unknown, but undoubtedly, talented hacker.
I had to shovel 60 megabytes of sources that had accumulated on the server over the many years of its existence.
Disable various commands (for example, touch, which can change the mtime file, and look for changes), hang guard on nodejs, which monitors changes in FS and even add a second authorization for administrator accounts.
Well, physically isolate all scripts that I don’t trust (for example, a forum for invision)
(This is the price to pay if half of the scripts were written 5 years ago, and the admin is lazy, and we also want to sleep ourselves)

September 2011.
On the approach is another refactor, which will finally remove the binding from prototype.js and transfer the cards to the new system.
Attendance 70k.
After a couple of days, I am again going on vacation and again in Sochi.
The circle will end.

Update
September 18, 2011. Sochi.
Yesterday we sat on the “Bossa Cottage” and celebrated 7 years from the date of the wedding.
Came sms - sites are not available.
The server has dropped the network card.
During the restoration work, someone didn’t very carefully rebuild the server and his innoDB crashed.
All as I waited

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

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

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

Now neighbors is
15 thousand registered neighbors people, because registration is terrible is not required
20 thousand tweets
250 thousand comments left to various places
400 thousand different places and 350 thousand reference objects
and 700 thousand edits of these places and objects.

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