Service goal setting. How the idea gained incarnation

Each idea born in the head of the creator has its own future. Some remain an embryo, others kill skepticism of the creator or those around him, and only the strongest begin their life, growth and development. In the article I will tell the story of the birth of the service to achieve the goals - SmartProgress and reveal small technical points that interested some habrayusers.

For those who do not know about our service, please read the article written earlier.

Idea

At that moment, when the idea of ​​creating SmartProgress came to my mind, I already had several projects that were not very successful. The main project that brought me profit was a torrent tracker. It was my first major and successful project, I was created as a teenager, then I just wanted to do something that would bring profit. Then it was understood that because of its subject matter, this project will not live forever, so I persistently searched for the idea of ​​a new project. At this time, I wanted to do much more - to make a unique project of social importance and helping people. At first, the ideas did not at all want to go to the head, it seemed that everything was already there, it was not possible to do something absolutely new and necessary.
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Such moods lasted long enough, so it’s not surprising that I grabbed the first thought that came to mind. The year was spent on implementation, as a result, this obsession weakened and I looked at my finished product with a sober look - it was a Vkontakte clone with slight differences in functionality. It was a disappointment, but was not going to give up.

This time I was no longer chasing the first idea I had gathered for a long time in my head, I wrote down especially interesting ones in a notebook, until the idea of ​​SmartProgress came once. It seemed so interesting and successful that it was chosen for implementation. The experience of an unsuccessful project prompted me to need a partner. Alone, you can go on the wrong road for a very long time and no one will stop you. The question of who would like to see as his partner was not, there was only one thing - to recruit him. Fortunately, he turned out to be the same adventurer as me. So there were two of us in the team - me and Fan_Fan (Sergey). The whole graphic part lay on Sergey - design, design and interface, technical on me. After discussing all the details, we got to work.

After implementation and launch, we received a lot of feedback from people who also thought about such a service, as well as from those who have already done something similar. Therefore, the advice - do not wait until someone else realizes your idea, look for ways to be faster, another option is to do better.

Finance

As I wrote above, I have a profitable project that works in almost complete autonomy, which gives me a lot of time to develop SmartProgress. Also, due to the current project, there is funding for SmartProgress - advertising, hiring freelancers (they hired a translator to create an English version). The project does not have a special financial need, so we are not actively engaged in the active search for investors as long as we manage on our own. Of course, several additional programmers would significantly speed up the development process, so we do not exclude the possibility of investing.

Technical details

Long thought on what to do the project. As a result, I decided to take the Yii framework as a basis. The main criterion for selection was the speed of work and Yii showed good results. Also behind Yii was: good documentation, active community and dynamic development of the framework.

Here are some extensions used:
Mailing - YiiMailMessage
Photo Upload - Xupload
Log in / register through social networks: HybridAuth

The site is located on a dedicated server XEON X3440 4x2.53 GHZ / 24GB RAM / 2x2000GB HDD
Nginx is used as a web server in conjunction with php-fpm
Database - MySQL
Opcode Caster - APC
There is still enough server capacity, so the issue of optimizing for high loads is not yet worth it.



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