What did Habrazdozateli told

There were about 150 people in the audience, mainly students, as well as developers, managers and users of Internet products. The authors of the best questions from the audience were presented with the book by Anton Popov “ Blogs. New sphere of influence .

Video of the meeting (500 MB AVI) , alternative
Mio Presentation

Project start

About a product similar to today's Habr Denis Kryuchkov thought while working on Webplanet . After he was fired from there, he took up the idea more closely - namely, he walked around the city for 2 months, pondered, watched. Thus was born the concept of a resource where commenting would have equal rights with staff editors and journalists — he himself would be the same authors. Then for another 2 months, he himself drew the design, agreed with a familiar programmer on the development of the first version of the site. How quickly the corrections were made to the system did not suit Denis, and he decided to approach the project more fundamentally - he took a loan from a bank, borrowed it from his parents and began to create a full-fledged version of the system.

Habrarevolution

The primary concept of the site was such that editorial posts were published in the “texts” section, and posts of other participants - in the “blogs” (?) Section. However, over time, dissatisfaction of users began to grow, inequality in rights was achieved and “habrarevolution”, under which each user received the right to be a full-fledged author.

The work of journalists and editors

From the very beginning of the project, several journalists actively worked there under the guidance of the editor. The editor studied the Internet news situation in the morning, distributed tasks to journalists and wrote several notes a day himself. Over time, the share of their work in the total amount of content decreases.

Mio's appearance

In the course of the growth of the user base and user activity, the user Mio, who managed to take first place in karma among users in a record amount of time, attracted Deniskin's attention. As it turned out, Igor at that time worked in Kazan in the field of political propaganda. Deniskin contacted Mio and persuaded to change this sad occupation to work for Habr in Moscow. Now Mio is a project manager for Habrahabr and Igrostr.
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Business aspects

After some time after the beginning of the rapid growth of the project an investor appeared. Now the company belongs to the investor and Deniskin. The first advertisement of the hosting company Masterhost was sold when it reached 5 thousand visitors per day. The project has repeatedly tried and is trying to buy, for example, companies such as the Publishing House Afisha and Yandex.

Habrahabr as a product began to pay off relatively recently, but the costs of its development are almost covered. The new version of Habr will have a number of services for companies in communication with audiences, as well as paid features for the users themselves.

Market specialization

If the Futuriko company is engaged in the creation of general thematic resources, without a clear focus, then Thematic Media see their task in meeting the goals of users in a certain thematic area.

The choice of topics and the formation of the product image

The choice of the topic of the next project occurs as a result of discussion by the staff of the topics of interest and competitive analysis. For example, Deniskin himself is actively interested in football, considers him one of his main interests, and thus acts as the project manager for Dribbler. Next comes the outline of the sections and pages of the site, the joint generation of the project name.

Design

The design (and layout on the tables) of the first version of Habr was made by Deniskin himself, now the key interface solutions are determined by the team, and the graphic elaboration of the details is given to the specialized companies and freelancers. Thus, now Samara TurboMilk is working on the design of AutoCadabra, and Kazan Knock-Knock is working on Ignostroy. This approach, despite the seemingly high costs of communication, has its advantages, because creates between contractors a kind of competition for quality.

Organization of the development process

Despite the fact that the authors of the project, according to them, have read a sufficient amount of literature on project management, they believe that they are not “working on books”. The changes are permanent, even at the stage of layout, despite the fact that in books like " Managing complex Internet projects " Yordon "this is prohibited." As a result, the timing of projects increase on average by 2 times relative to the planned.

There are currently 15 people working on Thematic Media. At each project there is at least a manager, programmer and technologist (layout designer).

Frames

People come to the company mainly through ads on the site. They are asked questions - why do you want to work with us, why do you leave the old job and questions about the professional sphere. About higher education questions are not asked. All employees of the company are active users of Habr.

Technical configuration

Now the site works on 3 servers. Technologies used are PHP and MySQL.

Security

To protect against DDOS attacks, Cisco equipment is used, which collapses uniform requests at the hardware level. Detection of errors in the site code is mainly due to user reports, sometimes - defaces.

PS Those who were at the meeting - please complement and correct.