Ovkuse
http://ovkuse.ruOvkuse is one of the biggest cooking communities, where users share and discuss food recipes. Cookpad acquired it in 2017.
I helped maintain and develop the community. I also implemented a few significant projects:
Improve workflow and stability
Ovkuse started in 2008 as a simple Wordpress blog with a handful of cooking recipes. Over the next 9 years it became one of the biggest cooking communities in Russia.
I introduced a version-control system for tracking changes in source code, created different types of automated tests to make sure new changes doesn’t break the website, integrated logging and error reporting.
Improve recipe posting using ML
When posting a cooking recipe, an author has to choose a relevant category and a sub-category manually. It was frustrating for authors since there were a dozen categories with more than a hundred sub-categories.
I created a backend that analyzes an author recipe’s title in real-time using machine learning and suggests relevant categories. It made the recipe posting process much smoother.
Optimize Wordpress for heavy traffic
During Christmas season Ovkuse gets much more visitors than usual.
I helped optimize Wordpress to handle 500K+ hits per day.
Redesign
Ovkuse consisted of two main sections: the community and the recipes database, which used different CMSs (InstantCMS and Wordpress respectively). So they looked a bit different. There was also a mobile version of the recipes section, which also had a different theme optimized for small screens. We decided to build one common responsive theme for all sections.
I converted layouts created by a designer to a responsive HTML markup using reusable components and integrated the markup with Wordpress and InstantCMS. I also created a style guide for CSS and JS.
Technologies:
PHP, Python, MySQL, Wordpress, InstantCMS, Selenium, BEM, scikit-learn, Ansible.I worked on Ovkuse from 2011 to 2015 as a lead developer.