Pokazywarka

Rapid hosting for simple web pages, focused on scalability. After getting popular, it was sold to Interia company group.

PHP
JavaScript

My work

I was a developer implementing this service for OXE Internet Solutions. I handled all its PHP backend and JavaScript frontend implementation. There were some innovatory (for that time) solutions, like an component for photos uploading (written in JavaScript, PHP and C++) – it was better than any other existing implementation I found. I also did a JavaScript image cropping tool, which worked even better than the inspiration source (Google's Gmail avatar editor).

A small start-up bought by a big company

Pokazywarka was originally thought as a simple service to be used by a small group of friends. Due to lack of such sites on the Polish market, there were a minor popularity expected. After its release, the popularity overgrown any expectations.

Fortunately, the service was designed to be lightweight (it was originally served on a shared hosting) and capable to hold short and high peaks of visits, in case of Slashdot effect for any user created document. After consecutive popularity rising (mostly among users of Wykop – the Slashdot clone for Polish market), the service was still resistant for the heavy load.

After two years of its evolution and moderately high popularity gained, OXE sold this service to Interia company group, one of the big internet companies on the Polish market.