The Story Of CrazyEngineers - How CE Came To Life
I graduated with a first class degree in Electrical Engineering in 2003. But it was the year many companies had put hold on the recruitment activities and our campus saw no companies visiting for recruitment. It was one long year comprising of ups & downs, GRE & CAT preparations, submitting 'hard copies' of resume to various companies and so on. My friends and I were clueless about our future. We were aimless and restless. The times were bad and were made worse by the news of our poor performing batch mates getting jobs one by one. Looking back, I can't stop laughing at our own impatience & jealousy. However those were the times that made us a bit cleverer about almost everything!
After one long year, most of us got jobs in IT companies. No matter what our discipline was, we had to pick up IT companies as they were the only ones making offers. I was fortunate enough to get a job very close to my residence. It was year 2004. I had became a software engineer and life was all set. I was earning & learning well. My parents even started talking about my marriage to which I always responded with an angry face. But the destiny had something else in store for me.
I do not come from a business family. My Mother is a housewife and father is an engineer. Ever since I was a kid, we've always had post-dinner discussions about all the topics under the Sun. My mother always supported and encouraged me to do extra-curricular activities. I grew up watching my father fix everything broken and make it work. So I was very clear that I'd become an engineer. My parents allowed me to take up any discipline I want be it engineering, medical, arts, law, science or whatever. I developed special interest towards electricity and I knew I'd do something in Electrical or Electronics engineering. But there I was, sitting in a cubicle, working on software for a leading IT company! Something had to change.
So I made a plan for myself. Having prepared for GRE & CAT in the past, I knew I'd get admission in any of the Indian Institutes Of Management (IIM). You see, I always aimed insanely, very high! Once admitted into IIM, I'd find like minded people and form a group to start something of our own and also learn a thing or two about running a company. So I went back to CAT preparations again. I used to prepare part-time while managing office hours. However, I began to realize that CAT wasn't my cup of tea and I was choosing the wrong path. I read tens of books on Entrepreneurship in the mean time, and found out that I need not do MBA to become an entrepreneur. I was in dilemma again.
My company offered newsgroups for internal communication among employees - it was a central place where we could post questions, ideas, jokes and everything and it'd get shared instantly with all the employees in all the offices of the company. Other employees would respond to questions and also contribute ideas, jokes, puzzles in their free time. I loved those newsgroups and became a regular contributor. It also earned me a bit of fame inside the company among the employees hooked the newsgroups 😀 . One thing I knew was, I really enjoyed posting on newsgroups and getting responses. I was preparing for CAT and I'd get all the help from Pagalguy.com - India's largest community of MBA aspirants. Inspired by Pagalguy, I started "the-big-k.com" (domain no longer available) for GRE discussions. It was October 2005 when I started it. The CAT was just few days away and I was losing interest in studies. Also I was getting nowhere with the-big-k.com. I was preparing my mind to abandon CAT. I had similarly abandoned GRE 2 years ago because I thought I'd stay India and do something here than following the beaten path of GRE-MS-Settling in USA.
I always enjoyed watching two amazing shows on Discovery Channel: Mega Structures and Extreme Engineering. I've always dreamed of being a part of a mega project and still do. I remember it was November 24, 2005. I was in my office and searching for a place where the engineers who work on larger-than-life projects come together to exchange ideas, solve problems and help each other. I searched for about 10 minutes. "Come On! This can't be true!", I said. There was no place for engineers to come together online. After-all, Engineers are the ones who filled this world with awesome stuff. They've no place to come together? Shocking discovery it was! Well, later I did discover that there are few websites that have similar concept; but they were not popular. Opportunity was knocking the doors and I had to do something about it.
With some experience of 'the-big-k.com", I knew how to register a domain. I began my search for a relevant domain where I could gather all the engineers. The most obvious domain names were taken but the sites were not live, not reachable. After searching for various domain names, "CrazyEngineers" popped up in my mind. I fell in love with the name and above all, it was 'Available'! Wow! I needed a credit card to book it! But I only had a debit card that didn't work for online transactions.
I took my bike and went home (just 2 minutes drive). I told my mother my new idea and the name I came up with. However, I wasn't very sure whether I'd book that name or even do something about it. My mother instantly approved the idea and the name. "CrazyEngineers is an excellent name. Everyone would love it. Go with it!", She said. Had she not approved the name and told me to go with it, CE wouldn't have been a reality. CE exists because of her.
The next step was to call my father and ask for his credit card number 😁 . I called my father and explained the idea. He agreed immediately and gave me the card details. I logged on to the domain registrar and booked the domain "CrazyEngineers.com" on November 24, 2005.
I decided that I'd anyhow launch the site on my Birthday, November 26. I had 48 hours to launch the website. I spent all of my non-office hours setting up CE Forums on /forum/ and had nothing to display on the main domain. I installed a simple redirection script on the main domain to redirect every visitor to the 'forum/'.
CE came to life on November 26. The rest is history created by all of you. CE's power is shared by all our CEans who make it stronger, useful and even bigger every day. The credit for making CE what it is, goes to all of the active CEans and Mods who spend major part of their everyday life on CE, helping others expecting nothing in return.
A big salute to all CEans!
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Kaustubh KatdareThe Story of CrazyEngineers Part II: 2011 - 2019
It's been long time since I wrote the Part I of the story. Back then CrazyEngineers was just 5 year old site and we were very different from what we are today.
Since its inception till 2011; CrazyEngineers continued to grow as a forum that used "vBulletin" as the underlying software. Unfortunately, vBulletin was a dying software. The main developers of the software had left to start a new forum development company called "xenForo".
Those were the days we decided to do "something more". We had lot of engineers and we thought we could do a lot more to help them. We were aiming to evolve CrazyEngineers into a vibrant network of engineers from all around the globe.
However, there were several challenges -
- None of us knew how to write code.
- vBulletin was dying; and xenForo was a promising software; we decided to migrate to it.
- We were making enough money to run CrazyEngineers through online advertising. To grow; we needed a new way to monetize the site.
On December 01, 2011 - We decided to take a bold step and switched the platform to xenForo. We also decided to find developers who could help develop the platform and add new features that we wanted.
The transition was smooth; but Google does not love any major site modification. Google decided to lower our ranking and the traffic dropped to about 50% of what we were getting.
That was expected. All fellow CEans were contributing awesome content and those were the days CrazyEngineers' News Blog; which was the front-face of CrazyEngineers got into Google News.
We hired a team of news bloggers who produced amazing articles and our stories would trend on the front page of Google News. Our traffic was slowly on the path to recovery.
But the destiny had some other plans!
In September 2012, something very unexpected happened. Our traffic dropped by ~60% - because of a glitch in a plugin that we used for our blog (powered by WordPress). It resulted into tens of thousands of 404 (page not found) error pages and we had no clue how to fix it.
What followed was almost a year and half long pursuit of fixing the errors, ditching WordPress and completely shifting the blog content to XenForo. Those were extremely painful days and we were trying hard to get the site back on the track.
The efforts paid off; and we got the traffic back - and the site started getting more traffic than ever in the history.
We worked with several leading advertisers around the world and made money that would go into funding the development of new features on the top of our xenForo platform.
Unlucky in Outsourcing:
Looking back, the biggest problem we had was none of us could write code. We had to rely on developers for even smallest of the feature or bug-fix. The developers we hired would work on the add-on for 2-6 months and give up. I think the reason was that xenForo, back then, had a very limited developer community and there was no useful developer documentation available.
We kept hiring developers who'd either produce useless software OR just quit. Outsourcing wasn't working for us - oh, we did hire everywhere: India, South Korea, France, Canada, USA, UK. But all we got was frustration.
This had to stop!
Our optimism resulted into loss of several years in getting the platform developed. Finally, we had to do something and boy, we did something that looked impossible: We decided to learn to code and develop everything on our own.
Yes, it looked impossible. We had several developers (12, to be precise) quit. But our belief in the possibilities led us to do the impossible. I picked up back-end development and Ankita decided to take the responsibility of the front-end development.
Because we were new to coding; we decided to do a pilot program with WordPress as our framework. It's actually a blogging CMS, but it has an active developer base and we could quickly get any help we wanted.
After 6 months of hard-work and learning stuff from scratch; we launched CrazyEngineers.IO - at proof-of-concept (PoC) domain where we tested some of the 'web apps' that we wanted to launch on CrazyEngineers. The main site (CrazyEngineers.com) still ran on xenForo.
The CrazyEngineers IO was successful. Our "QUIZZR" app quickly became popular - so popular that it was impossible to run on WordPress. It gave us the confidence to launch all those "web apps" on the main site CrazyEngineers.
Launching The Current Version of CrazyEngineers
By 2017, it was clear that we could now launch apps. I had figured out that we needed a modern framework to handle all the new things that we wanted to launch on CrazyEngineers. We picked up Laravel. Mid-2017; I began learning Laravel and by end of 2017; I was already working on the first web app "Discussions".
"Discussions" had to be our first web app on the new CrazyEngineers, because we couldn't simply let go of the old content on CrazyEngineers. It drove traffic and we wanted to protect all the URLs.
You may have noticed that unlike all other web apps on CrazyEngineers, "Discussions" has a different URL structure. It has "/threads/" in the URL.
The New CrazyEngineers was launched on May 2018. Our sign-up rate almost grew 10x after the launch!
However, as expected, Google did not like the big change; and decided to drop the traffic again. As of writing this, we're going through the lowest traffic on CrazyEngineers and we hope we'll see the traffic get back in coming weeks. We look forward to your contribution and support in making CE a success again.
We are just done launching all the old initiatives on CrazyEngineers. Know Your CEan (KYCEan) is coming soon and so are all the awesome apps that we had imagined.
All we ask is that you should bring your friends to CrazyEngineers; because when we all are together - everyone wins.
Kaustubh Katdare | March 5, 2019.
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Aswini cse
Hats of sir.You and your team are doing really dandy work.CE is really an amazing site.I learning new things here.I felt sad to found this site too late ? .I wish to came up this site early.
Definitely this CE will grow tremendously ? .
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Vivek Rai
One question.
Why is google lowering the traffic?
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Ramani Aswath
#-Link-Snipped-#
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Kaustubh Katdare
#-Link-Snipped-# - Google, in general, does not favor huge site-wide change. It has to crawl the entire site and figure out what changes were made. It therefore lowers the rankings just to be on the 'safer side'. Unfortunately, we can't really predict how long Google will take before restoring the trust in the site.Â
We still pull decent traffic and I'm sure we'll get back to growth trajectory with our new system. I'm confident we'll have support and contribution from all our fellow CEans. There are exciting features and apps lined up and we are working hard to bring them to you faster than ever before.Â
I think #-Link-Snipped-# , #-Link-Snipped-# , #-Link-Snipped-# , #-Link-Snipped-# , #-Link-Snipped-# , #-Link-Snipped-# , #-Link-Snipped-# , #-Link-Snipped-# would relate to the story I shared. They've witnessed CE's ups and downs ?Â
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Ramani Aswath
Not many will see the downs. Authour Wayne Dyer says: "it is almost a universal law that a fall of some kind precedes a major shift."
So let us up, up and away...
#-Link-Snipped-#
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Shivam Sharma
Very inspirational story.. SIR! ? I am here with full support and ready for any contribution.
I ask all my friends to join all the time. Together we will build the world's most awesome engineering community. ?
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Anoop Mathew
Growth is inevitable. CE has been a significant part of my life especially when I was studying as an Engineering Student (2008 to 2012) and during the time I worked as an Engineer (2012-2014). Now I've completed MBA(2015-2017) and moved on to a Management/Business Role(2017 onwards) where Engineers work under me. However, CE still is a live area of discussion and knowledge gaining source to me. I wish I had more time now to deep dive into some interesting topic of discussion or experiment with some tool/OS. My Engineering days would have been wasted away had it not been for all the learning & friends I got from CE.
I have gone through 3 or 4 UI changes in CE, and am happy how CE has evolved from a Forum to a more Tech Oriented Company.
One of my favorite sections here is currently the 'Founders Circuit'.
Proud CEan!??
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Ashraf HZ
It's great to see you & Ankita's perseverance in getting CE to the next level. Since I first joined in 2007, CE has indeed formed an integral part of my academic and career life, meeting awesome CEans and discussing myriad of interesting topics. At times I take it for granted the effort that Biggie and the team had gone through to explore new features and keep the CE train running. Keep up the good work guys, and I hope the CE community becomes more stronger and active!
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Mohit Patil
I might have missed all the fun but I think this website has a great potential....
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