From 2010 to 2019 I worked at the SKV24 web studio (skv24.ru): client websites, internal services, servers, devops, telephony.
About the project
SKV24 is a Moscow-based web studio: website development, promotion, and support. I worked remotely from December 2010 to April 2019. About 90 projects passed through my hands over that time — from corporate sites and online stores to the studio’s own services. I created a repository for every project and worked through version control — around 17,000 commits in total, roughly half of them mine.
My role
I worked as a full-stack developer. The technical side of the studio was on me: development, servers, backups, telephony. I discussed tasks and plans with the studio owner and the project manager; in different years one or two other developers worked alongside — the standards for code, repositories, and servers were the ones I set.
What I did
- Business directory portal — an engine for a network of city portals (korolev1.ru, spravcom.ru, and about 40 city sites and subdomains): organization directory, classifieds board, comments, filters, a shared admin panel for all cities. CodeIgniter, multi-domain architecture, 109 database migrations. I developed it from my first days at the studio and maintained it until 2018.
- Client websites — about 150 sites over the years: corporate sites and online stores on OpenCart, Joomla, WordPress, MaxSite CMS, 1C-Bitrix. From one-off fixes, migrations, and malware cleanup to development from scratch; dozens of sites lived in my repositories for five to seven years.
- Uptime monitoring (RoboPing) — a website monitoring service from scratch: Node.js and MongoDB, HTTP, SSL, and WHOIS checks, page screenshots, a public status page, email alerts via Mailgun and SendGrid.
- SEO monitoring (WebSeoGuard) — a site-change tracking tool: page crawling, new and missing pages, HTTP statuses, robots.txt, trend charts.
- MySeoTool — a separate link and SEO metrics monitoring service; by volume of work one of my largest projects at the studio, over a thousand commits.
- Price monitoring — a competitor price-monitoring and automatic repricing system for an online store.
- Auto parts catalog — vehicle-tree part lookup, a “garage” feature, OEM and aftermarket cross-references, 1C integration; the project was packaged into an LXD container for handoff.
- Servers and devops — built and configured servers for colocation (Supermicro, remote setup over IPMI), moved sites between hosting providers (15+ migrations), backups for all projects, monitoring (Zabbix, Munin, netdata). Incidents: cleaning up infected sites, DDoS recovery with no data loss, emergency relocations during the mass IP blocks of 2018.
- Telephony — an internal PBX on Asterisk: SIP numbers for employees, call recording, a voice menu (IVR), a GSM gateway for calling mobiles through a voice 3G modem. For clients I set up Asterisk-based call recording, later migrating them to Zadarma.
Results
- About 150 client websites passed through my hands over eight years — from one-off fixes to sites built from scratch for the client and supported for years; the work history is preserved in repositories from 2010–2019.
- The studio’s internal services — uptime monitoring, SEO tools, repricing — ran in production and were used in day-to-day work.
- The studio hosted sites on its own colocated servers; the infrastructure survived DDoS attacks and the 2018 IP blocks with no data loss.
- I tuned projects at every level — MySQL queries, PHP code, moves to more powerful hardware. The result: faster responses, better search rankings, more visitors. A large online store sped up by about 30% after MySQL optimization — confirmed by the client.
- Eight and a half years of continuous remote work — from the first commit in the studio’s repositories (December 2010) to the last (March 2019). During that period I progressed from client-site development to owning internal services, infrastructure, incident response, and production operations. Much of that grew out of evenings and weekends: they went into learning technologies and finding solutions I brought into the work on my own initiative. That foundation is what later let me work independently, on my own terms.
Stack
PHP · CodeIgniter · OpenCart · Joomla · WordPress · 1C-Bitrix · Node.js · MongoDB · MySQL · jQuery · Linux · Nginx · Apache · Docker · LXD · Asterisk · Zabbix · Mercurial · Git
