Tag Archives: personal

 

WordPress 3.0, Social Media in Russia, Hiring & Coffee

So, there’s quite some interesting stuff going on around here and let’s of course begin with WordPress. Yes, WordPress 3.0 has been released, some blog posts of mine got even more visibility and I’ve been interviewed on the WordCast Conversations show – thank you so much @kymhuynh and @lorelleonwp.

I don’t know when the show will air, but Kym promised to let me know the scheduled date as soon as they set one, so stay tuned for an update – I’ll write a separate post for that one.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is in the US, visiting Apple, Twitter & others from the Silicon Valley. He finally got his Twitter accounts: @KremlinRussia and @KremlinRussia_E (for the English speaking ones). Both accounts are verified and following @BarackObama ;) He gained over 30k followers within two days and is now using his own URL trimming service – krln.ru! He also has some quite cool photos of the Twitter office, the Apple office and Steve Jobs ;)

Speaking about photos, a few days ago I came across a real New York City Taxi here in Moscow. It was parked in Lyublino (South-East), had no number plates, and disappeared after a couple of days. I guess it was some Russian oligarch living in NYC who got drunk on Friday and decided to visit his relatives in Moscow during the weekend :D Oh well ..

NYC Cab in Moscow

My apologies, this was shot from my iPhone, not the best size and quality. View the full photo here. So, as promised by the title, a short list of facts I found interesting this week, mainly about hiring:

  • MoiKrug (Russian Linked in clone) is not that bad.
  • HeadHunter.ru & SuperJob.ru ARE that bad.
  • Luxoft know who I am and have my contact details.
  • It’s a good idea to speak to candidates over the phone for 15-20 minutes before inviting them over for a job interview. 60% are usually dropped out.
  • SugarCRM is boring, BaseCamp too. Microsoft Project rocks.
  • Russian Assist.ru e-payment system does not work.
  • Russian 1C is not the only ERP platform used in Russia. Some prefer Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly called Navision).
  • MVC and Zend Framework should be mastered immediately.
  • There are problems accessing Gmail from certain regions in Turkey.
  • Coffee without milk is okay, until you start drinking it everyday.

That’s about it for this week and yes, we’re still looking for young and talented PHP developers and web designers willing to work in Moscow startup. Feel free to contact me for more information about the job offers. Cheers, and have a great weekend!

Published 2 years ago with one comment tagged , , , , ,


 

Renting an Office in Moscow: A Case Study

It’s been a few months now since we started looking for an office here in Moscow. We didn’t ask for much as we’re a startup. All we were looking for is some lousy 50 sq meter office not too far away from the center.

The story dates back to February when we decided to move out of our expensive 13 sq meter office in South Moscow. We were quite sure that we’ll be able to find a suitable place so we signed off the rental contract for two last months. What I had in mind was to walk around Moscow for a day or two and write down the numbers from the red adverts on buildings. This should have helped us avoid agents, thus saving us some money on commission fees. Unfortunately it was not as simple as I thought it would be.

Nearly half of those phone numbers belonged to real estate agencies, who just rented the spots on or next to office buildings. The other half offered offices staring at 200 sq m. After a few more unsuccessful phone calls, we finally decided to contact an agency and ask them to look for something that meets our requirements. The agency replied within, err. Actually they didn’t reply at all. We were confused and quite disappointed, as their website had some quite interesting offers. Perhaps they weren’t pleased with our size, maybe they’re used to work with larger clients?

Right. After contacting a few more agencies we found out that they’re not too keen on working with such tiny offices, even for quite a good commission. But can you imagine how many small companies are looking fur such deals? I spoke to a friend of mine who got a place in the Moscow City complex, which is sort of class A+ and consists of a few very good looking towers. He said that it took them over four months to stay in line until somebody moved out. Later on I found out that it wasn’t a place in the towers that he got, but one nearby. Okay, nice area and infrastructure, but is it worth the money? $ 1000 per sq m per year! Wha?

So the contract we signed with our previous office owners finally came to an end and they kicked us out. No place to work, no office, no metro. Freelance. “Hurray!” thought my employees. “What a nightmare!” thought I, hoping it wouln’t last for more than a couple of weeks. I was wrong.

During those two weeks I managed to come across quite a good real estate agency. I was surprised when I saw their website. It’s quite modern, and yes, they used Google Maps to point out their offers on a map. They didn’t miss out traditional features though, such as area and price filters. I was also surprised that they showed the exact locations on the map. Agencies don’t usually do that, and soon I figured out that all their offers were commission-free! After speaking to an employee from the agency I found out that they signed agreements with office bulding owners, and commission was payed by them, very smart!

Renting an Office in Moscow

I took a ride with the agent the next day. Been to a couple of buildings that I was interested in, but unfortunately none of them suited our budget. Unlucky! So we asked them to look for something else within our price range. The offers were not too good, and quite soon they figured out that they were spending too much time with us, and stopped answering my phone calls. Duh! I was almost ready to make my choice.

Next was an agency who are quite well known in Russia, Europe and the United States. They had around 5 class A buildings in Moscow and very flexible solutions, such as shared offices and certain cards that would let you into an office a limited number of days per month, providing you with one working space. Quite interesting, but then again, not within our budget.

We were quite disappointed with all the time that we have spent on such an easy task (we thought). So we decided to take one last shot at plan A – find a phone number and try to arrange a meeting. And guess what, it turned out a success! We managed to find one C class building, very close to the metro in South-Central Moscow. It was the best choice for a 50 sq m office meeting our budget, and we got a balcony too! ;)

That’s about it. Next steps are to get all our stuff in there, get some good furniture from Ikea and, well.. Convince our employees that working freelance is bad, especially since we’re a team.

Did you have such experience in other cities and countries? Did you come across any innovative ways of building real estate websites? Except for craigslist and housingmaps.com of course ;) Feel free to share your thoughts and experience in the comments. Cheers!

Published 2 years ago with 4 comments tagged , ,


 

Preparing for Zend PHP 5 Certification

I mentioned on Twitter a while ago that I’ll be taking the Zend PHP 5 Certification exam at the end of this month. Well, the time has come! Exam is tomorrow noon. I’m quite excited about it, cause with this startup thing I had no time to study at all! I did read the Study Guide by php|architect and it’s quite good, but outlines only some aspects on each topic. It doesn’t really prepare you well for the exam, as according to the test sheets, they’re missing some questions ;)

Browsing the web, I came across a PDF book which contained the most common questions and detailed answers to each. It actually helped me out a lot, as they describe all the questions in detail, including the tricks, such as typos, operator priorities, etc. Speaking of typos, I cam across a dozen reading the first 4 sets of questions, and the guys said that typos are very common in the exam, as it tests our ability to analyze code and locate them, so if you’re taking this exam in the future, watch out for typos, don’t rush!

Rush? You’re given over an hour for the whole exam, which is a set of 70 questions. Personally, I took the practice exams a few times, and it took me no longer than 20 minutes to answer all 70, but honestly, I did rush in some of them, especially ones I didn’t know.

Interesting fact is that as soon as I signed up for the examination, I’ve been given these 10 practice tests I could take online. Without opening the book I took the first test, and guess what. I passed! Although I did miss quite a lot when it came to databases with PDO, XML manipulation and OOP design patterns, which is where I’m not too good at. PDO, well, I’ve been using procedural calls to databases all my entire life. I did know that there’s PDO, but I never realized that life is so much easier if we used that ;) XML manipulation, well.. Who cares if you’ve got JSON services ;)

And design patterns. It’s a very interesting topic indeed and seemed like something new to me at a first glance. Soon I figured out that we’re using such design patterns in all our products, but we just didn’t know they had names – Singleton, Factory.. MVC is different, and quite complicated. If the exam wouldn’t have been an online test, we could have easily defined MVC in our own words, as just like the guys at Google say, nobody knows what MVC is. Everybody thinks of it in their own way, which is why Google presented the MVP pattern – Model View Presenter.

Well, that’s about it. Just hope I don’t forget everything by tomorrow. Oh and by the way, I actually called the testing center and asked them if I could use my iPhone during the exam ;)

Published 2 years ago with 21 comments tagged , , , ,


 

Phew.. Party Time is Over. Welcome to 2010!

Hey there! Hope you all had a good rest and a fab time during your holidays. As you might have guessed, I did. I celebrated New Year in Italy! It was a 7-day stay at Rimini, from where we travelled to Venice, Florence and Rome. The New Year party was awesome, although the rain has probably ruined it for some of us. The good news is that we didn’t catch a cold ;)

We ate a lot of pizza and pasta, those were terrific, so I must have gained a few kilos (finally). Below are a few shots taken in Venice and Rome:

[nggallery id="18"]

Not much photos eh? Well, our camera broke in Florence, so we weren’t able to take any pictures there, but then again, there’s not much to see ;) So, the holidays are over and we’re all back to work. Must be tough for some people, but not me. I’ve recently switched to a new place (still in Moscow), major startup where I’ll be doing even more web development than I used to at the old place, so this year we’ll cover more cloud computing topics, website design techniques and SEO goodies ;) and of course WordPress.

The huge plans for this year involve multi-instance Amazon Web Services (clustering and load balancing), perhaps a few shots at Amazon SimpleDB and of course the almost finished WordPress plugin for Twitter control that I planned back in November last year.

So, good luck to everyone and have a productive 2010!

Published 3 years ago with 6 comments tagged ,


 

Foller.me Featured on ProgrammableWeb.com

Wow this is so awesome. I received an e-mail this morning and here’s what it said:

Dear kovshenin,

Your mashup Foller.me has now been published on ProgrammableWeb.
You can see it here: <a href="http://www.programmableweb.com/mashup/foller.me">http://www.programmableweb.com/mashup/foller.me</a>

It is also our Mashup of the Day for 09/13/2009. Congratulations!
It will be on the front page of ProgrammableWeb today.

Thank you for submitting your application and sharing it with our community.

Best regards,
The ProgrammableWeb Team

Well I’m not sure if there’s anything else I should add. I’m so excited that we finally made it to ProgrammableWeb – the best resource around for APIs and Mashups! Hope to see our API there too in a couple of months, meanwhile feel free to rate us: Foller.me at ProgrammableWeb.com.

Update: Thank you, thank you, you’re far too kind! Heh, take a look at this tweet I got mentioned in a few hours ago:

@kovshenin, thanks for the note, we’ve just listed Foller.me API on ProgrammableWeb

That does it. Foller.me has now been listed on ProgrammableWeb’s API directory. Awesome! Check it out: Foller.me API at ProgrammableWeb.

Published 3 years ago with 2 comments tagged , , , ,


 

Twitter Friendly Links: Now In Alphanumeric Mode

Hello my friends! Yes, I’m finally back from my two-week vacation. It was awesome, I spent a week in Magnitogorsk and another one in Sochi. The weather was great, it only rained on Sunday, when I was on my way back. Everything went fine, I’ve seen all my friends, we had a great time. Sochi is okay, getting ready for year 2014, though their airport in Adler still sucks big time!

Anyways, back to Moscow and back to work, and today I’d like to introduce a new feature in the Twitter Friendly Links plugin for WordPress. I call it the Alphanumeric mode, or format, or whatever. You see, people are used to TinyURL and bit.ly, where links are hashed and alphanumeric most of the time. I used a simple base 32 encoding algorithm in my case, plus added a few thousand, so that the links wouldn’t be shorter than three symbols. Not very nice to see example.com/a I guess.. Right? The Generic mode is still there and switched on by default for all the retro guys like me ;) Yes, I do prefer numbers and I know bit.ly would if they hadn’t hosted thousands of new links every day.

Also, I removed the rev=canonical option cause it’s pretty much outdated and encourage you to use the rel=shortlink HTML and HTTP headers, and rel=canonical too, as encouraged by wordpress.org. By the way, it’s pretty cool to see wordpress.com blogs get shortened links by wp.me as announced here: WP.me – shorten your links and they too support shortlink relations (both HTML and HTTP), which was why I decided to stick to them. Right, as Sam Johnston mentioned in the comments, that made over 7 million blogs accept the shortlink relations. Twitter clients should now be thinking about plugging that into the clients. It would make linking much easier, although may be a little more traffic consuming.

Or what if the guys from Twitter would.. Arrgh, hell no =) Impossible…

P.S. Hope you switched to WordPress 2.8.4 in time before the massive password reset attacks ;) I’m kidding, there were no massive attacks.. I guess =)

I’m so glad to be back. Have a great day everyone!

Published 3 years ago with 5 comments tagged , , , ,


 

My First Vacation. Seriously ;)

Okay folks, after years of hard work around the clock, I’ve finally got some time off, so yes, this is my first vacation ever. It all started last Saturday when I took off to Magnitogorsk to see my relatives. I’m actually having a great time here and the weather is pretty cool, but I’m leaving to Sochi this Saturday for one more week and then back to Moscow and of course, back to work ;)

Hope you all miss me and hope to bring you some sunny photos in a few weeks :)

Published 3 years ago with 2 comments tagged ,


 

And Yet Another WordPress Theme for Inspiration ;)

follerme_new_blog

My brand new creation: The Foller.me Theme for WordPress and I ain’t releasing it public ;)

Published 3 years ago with no comments tagged , , , , , ,


 

Foller.me Gets Featured on Startups Live TV!

StartupsLive.tv is definitely one of the best shows I’ve seen around these days and guess what! I got there!

Startups Live is the non-biased platform for any startup to get live exposure, a captive audience, and valuable feedback from potential business partners, customers, members, and investors.

I sent a request to Startups Live asking them to feature the Foller.me Twitter service I’ve created and bang! I got on the show! It was really amazing, I’ve never seen anything like it!

The girls are so wonderful! Charissa was the one interviewing me and Dannie took care of the promo and blog post. We had so much fun during the live recording, that we couldn’t stop reading the Foller.me profiles after the show, so if you missed the live version, you’ll never get to see what happened beyond the recorded version at Ustream.tv, sorry!

I was very nervous on the show, but Charissa and Dannie said that I never showed that (hope that this is true), although when I played back the recorded version and looked at myself, I kinda laughed. Do I really look that funny on TV? And the panda, oh that was weird, wasn’t it ;) but I couldn’t help it! Then, when Charissa asked me about the business model of Foller.me, wow! I didn’t know what to say, cause I haven’t really thought about that (much).

The guests in the chatroom during the show were amazing too, especially when we started reading their Foller.me profiles out loud, heh that was fun! And my brand-new-to-twitter brother @SoulSeekah got his one-minute celebrity spotlight on the show too, thanks for that girls!

Anyway, if you’ve missed the show, I feel terribly sorry for you! So go ahead and watch (at least) the recorded version on Startups Live. You won’t regret it.

Don’t forget to follow the girls on Twitter: Charissa Cowart and Dannie McClain. And definitely follow Startups Live on Twitter for the hottest news. Oh, I almost forgot, they have a Startups Live Facebook group. I suggest you join that too ;)

Published 3 years ago with 3 comments tagged , , , , , , ,


 

Linux Dummy: Unscheduled Maintenance

If anyone of you have tried to access the blog yesterday night, you might have noticed that nothing was working. Sorry! I’ll say it straight, it’s completely my fault. Yesterday evening I decided to set up a cron job for automatic backups on my VPS – a full MySQL dump and a compressed archive of the www directory. So I got a couple of error messages stating that I don’t have the right to access some files which were in the wp-content/upload and wp-content/cache folders… I was frustrated!

Next… Never attempt to do this, okay? I logged in as root, changed owner on all files and folders including sub-folders of the www directory, set it to kovshenin:kovshenin. Voila, the backup worked! In a couple of minutes my VPS ran out of memory and I couldn’t even logon via SSH to reboot the server!

Now that’s funny! I called my hosting provider this morning and asked them what happened? They said everything’s fine, rebooted my server. I managed to logon by SSH, ran the “top” command, and looked at my memory usage growth! 100% was reached in 17 minutes, and bang! Disconnect. Two more calls to my provider didn’t help. They said that the only thing they can do is reset my yesterday’s VPS state completely.

So what really happened? I’m not sure but I bet it’s the WP-Super Cache plugin for WordPress! You see, cached files were created by the user that the httpd (apache) daemon ran – thus, one called “webmaster”. The user “kovshenin” apperantly didn’t have access to those files, and the change owner command spoiled all the cache! Now the static files were owned by “kovshenin”, and “webmaster” (apache) didn’t have any rights for those files. WP-Super Cache must have been in an infinite loop trying to access those, and of course, with no luck – therefore memory leak.

After another reboot I managed to quickly get into the WordPress control panel, enable Maintenance Mode and disable all the other plugins. Enabled them one by one. Setting 0777 as the rights for the cache directory and two WP-Super Cache config files solved the problem. The site was working fine again, and the new generated cache files were owned by “webmaster”… The day has been saved.

But what about the backups? Finally, I came to a thought that both “kovshenin” and “webmaster” users should be in the same groups. So I added “webmaster” to the “kovshenin” group, and “kovshenin” to the “webmaster”. Everything’s great! Apart from the fact that my Google Analytics now shows 0 visitors for 21.05.2009. Jeez, what a dummy…

Published 3 years ago with 3 comments tagged , , , , , , ,



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