Projects
Not a portfolio — just a list of hobby projects. I never set out to be a designer or a developer, and most of these are frozen at their last available state.
I never intended to work as a designer or a programmer, or anything of the sort. This page is not a portfolio — just a list of some hobby projects. I never planned to maintain any of them for long, so most are simply frozen at their last available state.
Active and notable
phpbb.aliyah.co — Hebrew flashcards
Flashcards are a very effective learning tool. When I started learning Hebrew I found nothing that satisfied my expectations for language flashcards, so I decided to build my own.
The application is written in PHP and reuses the phpBB3 template engine and user management. I also toyed with the idea of a community forum for Ulpan students, but I did not get far with it. The database now holds about 1,000 Hebrew words and around 15,000 other records (attempts, links, and so on) excluding logs and debug data.
Both the design concepts and the details are documented in Russian on the forum. I still have plenty of ideas to make the flashcards better — and to rewrite them on a modern, non-PHP framework someday.
Loituma.ru
In 2006 a Flash animation of a Japanese anime clip set to “Ievan Polkka” by the Finnish folk band Loituma went viral across the Russian internet, spawning countless remixes, pictures, and spin-offs.
I was lucky enough to register the right domain names, and a simple homepage went up within a week or so. Through 2006 the site drew 50,000–300,000 unique visitors and up to 1 TB of data per month. It is a fine example of “passive” traffic — I essentially never maintained the project after those first couple of weeks.
The “Polka” has faded since, with almost no visitors today, but I still hope a new generation of kids will be ready to listen soon. :)
IEVA.ru
There is no real connection between the project name and its content — I always meant to invent one “later,” and “later” never came. So it is just a short, nice domain name, registered with “Ievan Polkka” in mind.
I designed this site back when DVDs were popular. It was a tool for managing home DVD libraries, with the option to share discs with neighbours and friends and to keep track of who borrowed what.
Fortunately, the era of DVDs ended sooner than I managed to make the project popular. I kept it running a while longer to write my own reviews of the films I watched.
One more thing…
There is always one more thing… — S.J. (c)
Web development has been a great hobby of mine since I was a kid, so there is a lot I could show — some of it designed and coded better, some worse. If you have looked over the projects above, you can be sure: I am not a developer and never intended to become one. One might ask, “Why publish all this, then?”
Well, this is a personal home page, and the whole point is to share one’s little secrets. I am an extrovert and I like to share my excitement for the many things I experience. Use the same explanation if some of my blog posts shock you — especially the old ones, especially the Russian ones, especially on LiveJournal.
Cher fan club — 199*
As a kid I was a huge fan of Cherilyn Sarkisian La Pier — better known as Cher — so I published a Russian fan page listing almost all of her work. It was plain HTML with one JS tool we would now call a “widget”: a builder for designing personal CDs, so anyone could put together a Personal Favorites album. Then I learned about copyrights and all that. :)
The source code is lost.
”Finance and Credit” sub-faculty of MGIMO University — 2000
I helped some friends earn a small bonus in their first university year by building a brochure site for the sub-faculty. The university was later reorganised and the site was closed. Plain HTML with a few Flash interface elements.
The site is offline, but I keep local copies of the source.
”Philosophy and Political Science” sub-faculty of MMA University — 2002
I earned a small bonus in my second year at my first university with another brochure site for the sub-faculty. The university portal was reorganised and the site was closed. Plain HTML with a few Flash interface elements.
The site is offline, but I keep local copies of the source.
TST — MTU-Intel helpdesk portal — 2004
During my first full-time job as a call-centre operator for a telecom provider, I became a trainer after a couple of months. Soon after, I built an intranet knowledge base full of manuals, diagnostic tools, and semi-automated algorithms for operators. The call-centre staff kept using that intranet for several years after I left.
Source code was the property of MTU-Intel Ltd.
grischenko.ru — version 1 — 2005
The first version of my personal homepage was built on Mambo CMS with a couple of add-ons. It served well for many years, even after Mambo went out of support. In early 2014 the CMS collapsed, and I decided to move the most valuable content over to Wix.
The source is saved locally, but it would take some effort to bring the site back up.
calls.masterhost.ru — .masterhost call-centre intranet — 2005
There was barely any intranet in 2005 when I started at this excellent hosting provider. The knowledge base began on Mambo CMS, but I went on to develop MANY add-ons for it. I reckon that between 2005 and 2007 I wrote about half of all my PHP code.
Source code was the property of .masterhost Ltd.
Asterisk PBX analyzer — 2006
We ran Asterisk PBX for the call centre and all local telephony at .masterhost. There were no good tools for analysing Asterisk logs, so I built a monstrous analyzer myself: Bash → MySQL → PHP. It also grew tools for managing Asterisk itself — IVR management, callback ordering, registering new agents, and so on.
Source code was the property of .masterhost Ltd.
More at .masterhost — 2005–2007
I built a whole pile of tools for .masterhost: search and playback of CCTV screenshots, automatic generation of agent timetables, a customer blacklist, agent-activity analyzers, and more. It might look like reinventing the wheel, but remember we are talking about 8–10 years ago.
Source code was the property of .masterhost Ltd.
Another dozen websites — 2005–2008
I did a little freelancing as a sysadmin and as “the guy” who deploys websites to hosting. I worked with WordPress, Bitrix, Mambo, Joomla, vBulletin, phpBB, and many other CMSs and web applications. These were not my own projects.
Source code was, and is, the property of the clients.
Martsevich.ru — 2007
This one is a bit different: I set it up (Coppermine Photo Gallery + WordPress) for a classmate who is keen on photography, and I still maintain it from time to time when software updates come out.
martsevich.ru — still running.