milestones

Happy 20th birthday, LWN!

Linux Weekly News (aka LWN) is celebrating its 20th birthday. Wow, that’s quite impressive! Not many web sites can say that. But even fewer can do so while covering technology news related to Linux and other Open Source Software.

I’ve been a reader of LWN since their early days. I’ve been subscribed to it also at different times during the years (see 2002, and then 2004). And I’m glad that they are still around. I still catch up with the RSS feed on a weekly basis.

Happy birthday, LWN! And thanks for all the hard work and excellent content.

Happy 20th birthday, Slashdot!

Slashdot is celebrating its 20th birthday.

Today we’re marking Slashdot’s 20th birthday. 20 years is a long time on the internet. Many websites have come and gone over that time, and many that stuck around haven’t had any interest in preserving their older content. Fortunately, as Slashdot approaches its 163,000th story, we’ve managed to keep track of almost all our old postings – all but the first 2^10, or so. In addition to that, we’ve held onto user comments, the lifeblood of the site, from 1999 onward.

20 years is indeed a long time, and especially so on the Internet. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine the Web without social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Without YouTube. With no Wikipedia. Without Gmail. Heck, without even so much as Google search. Well, it was around, but not many people knew about it yet. Blogs weren’t invented yet. Web 2.0 was years away. There were no RSS feeds yet. Heck, many people who can’t imagine their lives without the Internet today weren’t even born yet!

I was introduced to Slashdot back in 1997 or 1998 by my good friend and mentor – Vladimir Ivaschenko (aka hazard). I think it was on the same day as he told me about Freshmeat.net, later re-branded as Freecode.com, the best resource at the time to find and learn about Linux applications (to which I haven’t been in years), and Linux Weekly News, which I am still a frequent reader of.

I’ve been reading Slashdot since then myself, and I have recommended it to every IT professional and technology enthusiast without exception. IT industry in general, the Web, and the Open Source movement wouldn’t have been the same without Slashdot. And neither would I.

I have learned a lot about a lot from Slashdot – new companies, new technologies, new ideas, different perspectives, influential people, and more. I’ve linked to Slashdot posts and comments from this blog more times than I can remember. (Google Search estimates 1,060 pages linking from this blog to Slashdot since I started posting here 17 years ago).

If I had to pick a single my most memorable moment about Slashdot, that would be without the doubt September 11, 2001. I wasn’t anywhere near the United States that day, but it wasn’t about the USA. The whole world has changed that day. Nobody knew what was going on. Everything just stopped, or slowed down to a crawl. Everybody was trying to understand, or at least find more information about what happened. All the news sites – from the major ones, like CNN, to the small local newspapers – were dead under the traffic spike. Slashdot was pretty much the only one that could cope. It was slow, but it was there. Countless people in the comments were sharing bits and pieces of information. People were sharing photos and videos and redistributing them across a number of FTP sites.

At the time I was working at PrimeTel. There were quite a few people and everyone was desperate to know more. I remember downloading the pictures at turtle crawling speeds, and sending them off to a huge TV I had next to my desk (I was working on project involving video walls and a network of window displays). A crowd of people from the office were just standing nearby, staring at the TV with planes exploding into the towers, towers collapsing one by one, and all the havoc and rescue efforts afterwords. This was something… A decade and a half later, I still get shivers remembering that day.

This was the most powerful moment. But there were many more. There were numerous times when I started researching something just because of a story or a comment posted on the site. There were a few times when I changed my opinion after an insightful comment. And there were plenty of moments when I burst into uncontrollable laughter. Oh you guys in the comments, you are something!

I’d like to thank everybody who contributed to Slashdot in these last 20 years and who made it possible, and who kept it alive and kicking. You rock! Here’s to the next 20 years and more stories and insightful, interesting, and funny comments – Cheers!

Three years at Qobo

Today is my third birthday as the Qobo CTO. Here are the summary posts for the first and second years, if you are interested.

I haven’t had a boring year at Qobo yet. And this last one was the most eventful and interesting, both business and technology wise. Let’s have a quick look at the business side of things first.

Since last August, here are some of the things that happened:

In October 2016 we opened the Limassol office. It’s mostly used by developers and for developers. But we had a few client meetings in there too. If things go as fast an good as they are going, we’ll need to either expand it soon, or move to the new premises.
In December 2016 we closed the deal with our first angel investors. That was quite a lengthy and tedious process, during which we spoke to a lot of organizations and individuals, went through a variety of checks and audits, and figured out answers to many questions that we’ve never asked ourselves. As a result, we found partners who not only brought the money in for the company growth, but a wide range of business expertise. Personally, I’ve learned a lot during and after this process, and hopefully will boost my understanding of the business world.
In March 2017 we received the confirmation that our application for the Research and Development grant from the Cyprus government and European Union was approved. This process also took quite a bit of effort and time and is far from over. This money will help Qobo to grow even further and once the tender is complete we’ll have quit a thing to show for it. That’s about as much as I can say now.
In May 2017 we opened the London office. This one is mostly for our sales force and the expansion of business into the UK market.
Over the course of the whole year, we have grown our team quite a bit as well. We are now about 15 people, but it’s not the quantity that matters, but eh quality. We manage to bring in some people that I worked with in many previous jobs (Easy Forex, FXCC, Tototheo Group, FxPro, and even as far back as PrimeTel). And by the looks of it, the team will continue to grow.
And much like in previous years, we have signed more clients, did more projects, and delivered more solutions, both locally, here in Cyprus and abroad (primarily United Kingdom).

Now let’s have a look at technology a bit more. Last year I mentioned Qobrix, but I could give you any more details. Today, Qobrix is a real thing. It’s our own platform for building business applications rapidly. We developed it to a very usable state, and built quite a few applications with it, anything from custom processes, Intranets, and all the way up to the CRMs. The platform is being actively developed and is maturing every day. We have also started building a new website that provides plenty of information for it.

Big chunks of our development effort are being released as Open Source software – have a look at our ever-growing GitHub profile. We have also contributed to a number of Open Source projects in both CakePHP and WordPress ecosystems.

We are also getting much better at this whole cloud computing thing. Our knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is growing and improving. We have more servers now, use more services, and planning to expand even further.

Overall, as you can see, this was quite an intensive year, and it doesn’t look like things are slowing down. Quite the opposite. After three years at Qobo, I have to say that this is hands down the best job I ever had (and I had some pretty amazing jobs in the last couple of decades). I’m learning a lot every single day. I see the impact of my effort on the company as a whole, on the team, and on our clients. And I am still humbled by the expertise and virtues of people around me.

I’d like to thank everybody around me for all the wisdom, tips, hard work, and joyful moments during the last year. I’ll be raising my glass tonight for many more years like this one. Cheers!

15 Year Blog Anniversary

Today is the 15th anniversary of this blog. As most of you know, 15 years in technology is forever. 15 years on the web is even more so. Here are a few highlights to give you a perspective:

First post dates back to October 26th 2001. It wasn’t my first blog post ever. It’s just that the earlier history wasn’t migrated into the current archives.
Archives page provides access to posts of every month of every year, except April and May of 2009, which were lost during a major outage at a hosting company at the time.
The blog survived a multitude of migrations between blogging applications and their versions (static HTML diary, Nucleous CMS, Blog:CMS, WordPress), design changes (a dozen or so WordPress themes), and hosting companies (from a home server to the current Amazon AWS setup).
Way over 8,000 posts written. Hundreds of comments, pingbacks and trackbacks received. These varied across a large number of topics, anything from personal, work, technology, movies, photography, Cyprus, and more.
Millions of page views. Hundreds of thousands of unique visitors.
Millions of blocked SPAM comments. Millions of (mostly automated) attacks, varying from SQL injections and dictionary password attacks to a some more advanced techniques targeting particular pages or WordPress and its plugins vulnerabilities.
A variety of content reorganizations – posts, pages, categories, tags, short codes, templates, plugins, widgets, links, etc.
A variety of integrations – web services, social networks, automated postings, aggregations, etc.
A variety of monetization options – from “this is not for profit”, to ad spaces, to contextual ads, to sponsored content.

Have a look at some versions saved by the Internet Archive, dating back to 2004.

So, what have I learned about blogging in the last 15 years? Quiet a bit, it turns out. Here are a few things that I think are important enough to share:

If you don’t have your personal blog yet, go and start now. It’s well worth it!
Make sure you own your content. Social networks come and go, and when they go, chances are, all your content goes with them.
Don’t stress too much about the format, styling, and scheduling of your blogging. If you do it long enough, everything will change – the topics you write about, how much and how often you write about them, how your site looks, etc. Start somewhere and iterate.
Don’t go crazy with features of your blogging platform. Sure, there are thousands of plugins and themes to choose from. But all of these change with time. When they go away, you will have to either support them yourself, move to newer alternatives, or loose them. Neither one of those options is pleasant.
Things die. They disappear and then they are no more. That’s life. This happens. Don’t worry about it. Do your best and then move on.
Have fun! It’s your personal place on the web after all. Try scheduled posts to get into the habit. Try planning to get a better idea of what you want to do. But if it doesn’t work or becomes too difficult, move on. As I said, it’s your personal place and you don’t owe anybody anything. Do it for yourself. Others will come and go.

Here is to the next 15 years! :)

Two years at Qobo

Today marks the completion of my second year at Qobo Ltd. The first year was quite a ride. But the second one was even wilder. As always, it’s difficult (and lengthy) to mention everything that happened. A lot of that stuff is under the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) terms too. But here are a few generic highlights:

Vision and strategy – most of my first year has been spent in putting out fires, fixing things big and small, left, right, and center. The technology boost was necessary across the board, so it didn’t leave much time for the vision and strategy. I feel that we’ve made a huge progress in this area in the last 12 month. We have a clear vision. We have all the stakeholders agreeing on all key elements. We have worked out a strategy on how to move forward. And we’ve started implementing this strategy (hey, Qobrix!). In terms of achievements, I think this was the most important area and I am pretty happy with how things are shaping up.
Team changes – much like in the first year, we had quite a few changes in the team. Some of them were unfortunate, others not so much. The team is still smaller than what we want and need, but I think we are making progress here. If our World Domination plans will work out to even some degree, we’ll be in a much better place very soon.
Technology focus – we’ve continued with our goal of doing fewer things but doing them better. Our expertise in WordPress, CakePHP and SugarCRM grew a lot. We’ve signed and deployed a variety of projects, which resulted in more in-depth knowledge, more networking with people around each technology, more tools and practices that we can reuse in our future work.
Open Source Software – our GitHub profile is growing, with more repositories, pull requests, releases, features, and bug fixes. We’ve also contributed to a variety of Open Source projects. Our involvement with Open Source Software will continue to grow – that’s one of those things that I am absolutely sure about.
Hosting, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), and quality assurance – again, the trend continued this year. We are using (and understanding) more of the cloud infrastructure in general and Amazon AWS in particular. We have a much better Zabbix setup. And our love and appreciation of Ansible grows steeply. Let’s Encrypt is in use, but we’ll grow it to cover all our projects soon. We are also experimenting with a variety of quality assurance tools. We are using TravisCI for most of our Open Source work. And we are on the brink of using recently announced BitBucket Pipelines for our private repositories (sorry Jenkins, we’ve tried you, but … not yet). We’ve also jumped into ChatOps world with HipChat and its integrations, to the point that it’s difficult to imagine how could we have worked without it just a few month ago. Codecov.io has also proved to be useful.
Projects, projects, projects – much like the previous year, we’ve completed a whole lot of projects (see some of our clients). Some were simple and straightforward. Others were complicated and challenging. And we have more of these in the pipelines. Overall, we’ve learned how to do more with less. Our productivity, technical expertise, and confidence grows day-to-day. I hope we keep it up for years to come.
Website – one thing that we wanted to do for ages is to update our website. Which we did, despite all the crazy things going on. It’s not a complete redesign, but it’s a nice refreshment. And we’ve also got our blog section, which I promised you last year. All we need to do now is to use it more. ;)

There are a couple of major updates coming soon, but I am not at liberty to share them right now. But they are very, very exciting – that’s all I can say today. Keep an eye our blog – we’ll be definitely sharing.

As I said, it was quite an intense year, with lots of things going on everywhere. There were tough times, and there were easy times. There were challenges and there were accomplishments. There were successes, and there were mistakes and failures. But I wouldn’t have it any other way!

After two years, I am still excited about this company and about my job here. (Which, looking at my career so far, is not something that happens often.) I hope the next year will continue the adventure and by the end of it I’ll be able to proudly show you a few more things.