When I started working professionally in the web business I was keeping a nice list of all the projects I released online.
However after you are working hard for a few years keeping track seems impossible. Sometimes you release several projects in one month;
sometimes you work for months on the same thing. However when I look back now it seems I enjoy remembering the projects in which I've
put most emotion. Yes- projects can be very emotional experience. And yes- when you truly believe you are creating something exceptional
you really enjoy remembering the countless hours you've put into it.
Thus I don't keep anymore a recent list, or a complete list; just a highlight list.
A collaboration with the designer Daniel Smilovski this project turned out to be a lot of fun, since he is a perfectionist, a professional and a close friend.
We developed an advanced CMS system specially for the needs of this project and we were very glad it has been very well accepted.
I was closely involved with the design of the CMS, the server and client programming parts and various UI improvements.
I worked for Monster Worlwide (www.monster.com) in Prague in the team of Radim Ballner. That was an invaluable experience and I learned quite a lot about the workflow
in big corporations. I enjoyed particularly developing several small projects on my own initiative- one of them a mail server for our development environment,
I wrote it in Perl and later on I did a rewrite in Ruby, but what was most rewarding about it was how happy were everyone on the team to have this tool available.
In my team in Monster we were using PHP5/MySQL in combination with a lot of XML and XSLT.
"LORA" was a long term project for the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. A quite challenging project developed in C# on the .NET 2.0 Framework and SQLite database. The project was a set of tools for lexical analysis and it had to analyze vast amounts of texts and produce structured xml output. I spend endless hours doing optimization and going trough lists of XML input and output.
While I worked in AIP Solutions with my outstanding partners there George Kostov and Peter Assenov we created numerous multimedia solutions and websites for
TV and TV related projects.
We created and supported the web site of "Who wants to be a millionaire" ever since the show started in Bulgaria. In the latest
stages of the project we also created a custom online game in Flash which is still the official online "Who wants to be a millionaire" in the country.
Another highlight from the same period was my work together with George on various parts of the official "Big brother" web site. We created various Flash games and custom Big Brother chat rooms.
"Namerime" web site is definitely one of those unforgettable projects. The project was a social dating portal in which I was involved in almost all areas. I did
the most of the PHP/MySQL server programming and the design of the database. After the launch I was also responsible for the performance optimization of the underlaying database.
I build from the ground up a virtual chat room with avatars and different interactions in ActionScript 2.0 and Flash MX. The chat room was powered by a Java server -
also developed by me. In several occasions when we were short of people I also laid down some templates in HTML/CSS and wrote some JavaScript to power the front end.
Just so the picture is full I should mention also the maintenance scripts which were calculating the user ratings and executing various other tasks which had to be written in Perl - by me.
I mean - that was quite a project!
Somebody once told me "It seems you have been doing mostly TV projects"; "Well nobody is interesting in hearing about the great website we did for welding machines right?" was my answer.
Every project has its value in my experience. Let's just say the ones above are some of the projects I like remembering about.