Bye bye Osallistujat.com and Hobbydeed

End of an era: Osallistujat.com and Hobbydeed are terminated - forever.

15 years ago in March 2006 I was doing my PhD thesis and chatting in an office with a very good colleague, Markus Rautanen, he was establishing an ice-hockey h?ntsy team, Insin??rinkadun Oilers, in Hervanta. He was wondering how he could communicate with the players and how he could know who is coming today and who not. Accidentally, couple of days earlier my floorball team mate Jussi-Pekka Penttinen had proposed me to make public the sign-up system I had done for Soittorasia - the University's floorball club. This problem and request sparked something inside me and in couple of days the first prototype of a free sign-up and communication system was online: Osallistujat.com was born. Wayback machine shows that the portal looked like something below early 2007.

This was not my first sign-up system. I did one for just my Soittorasia team with Python in 2003 and one for the whole club in 2005. I spread the word via my friends and soon there were thousand daily users. I didn't earn anything for 5 years, just spent. I didn't mind. It was fun. I could finally use my programming skills for something that's useful to common people. If I was in a pub in Tampere, somehow I ended up talking about Osallistujat.com with strangers quite often. Users loved it and sometimes I got offered a good imperial stout. Osallistujat.com was the first of it kind in the world (afaik).

Retrospectively thinking that better environment (and better me) might have made it to Facebook kind of a breakthrough. However, I was/am not that kind of a person. I am not a sales person. And I have seen what sales people are like. And I couldn't have done that either. I didn't have the skills and my aim was to get PhD as soon as possible, establish a research group and lead it. Thinking about my university era with hindsight: starting it was at a time my best decision but leaving the university after 18 years was far better. Without entering I could not have left. So overall, definitely worth it.

Once it looked pretty green.

My methodology in the development and customer service from the very beginning was something that’s called design thinking. I didn’t know it back then but later I learned it when I was organizing with couple of colleagues a Challenge Based Innovation course in uni in collaboration with CERN. I was the user. I was also using the software every day. I had most groups (well some users had more active groups) and I was sole user of some features that I had implemented because I needed them. I had good skills to step into the shows of other users and I could solve their problem. UX was designed for engineers but you could do very superb stuff. Things that you can only imagine in competitors software even today.

I was particularly proud of the flip chart feature (thanks to wayback machine). It was so fun to develop that as well at a time. I couldn't sleep. It's very difficult for me to think anything more addictive than (web) programming. That's why I don't program all the time. It drives you crazy (I didn't dare to go to tests).

At most there were about 40 k weekly users. That was quite nice. I set up a company in 2011 to manage expenses. There was also some revenue from the ads. That was nice, but with 400 k weekly users I could have hired couple of people and it could have become something. Now and then it didn't. I never took salary from the company, but I could get laptops for development for free and buy a mobile phone and pay all the expenses. From that time I have still my hardware for my home Debian running multiple web pages for my needs (like training diary: Angular+Flask, mirrored nice UX text television, Angular+dotnet core etc). There are no moving parts in the whole computer: heat pipe cooling for CPU, RAM, Power, SSD. There was also some leftover in the money, so that all in all I can consider getting 5-7 euros per hour I worked for Osallistujat.com/Hobbydeed.

Another evolution of the UI.

Couple of times some business sales guys approached me and proposed: let’s make it big. One time I was offered 10 000 euros. One time 6% in a company that had nothing. Third, or was it fourth time, I got a deal that was ok (though I was never paid what was promised and agreed on a signed paper) and also Osallistujat.com code base was in a situation that something needed to be done. That was in 2013-2014. The php-mysql-html-javascript spaghetti with few overlapping versions was at it's end and I knew it must be fully renewed. We started making Hobbydeed.

I didn't understand anything about managing a software project or owning a company together with other people. I had been working with PhD students, post docs and alone. With top notch guys and me. It's different than working with (junior) developer and siloed backend developer (at a time, now different guy) who don't know the product they should deliver and people not understanding doing tech. I had no experience in giving detailed instructions or thinking commercially. I thought, if I spoke some time, people will implement my vision. That's how it worked with PhD students. Also the sales guy CEO in the new company didn't really understand what it takes to make such company profitable (not that I knew, I only knew what the users need and how to code myself). After 1.5 years of development we had nothing with the hired guys. Osallistujat.com was running and well there was nothing in Hobbydeed. All the money invested by the inverstors were lost and we needed to let the guys go.

About 8 months after that I was very frustrated with the situation. That was the project of my life and I was still doing CSM to Osallistujat.com, so I thought I'll implement Hobbydeed.com. It took about 9 months as a side job to implement, arguably, the worlds best hobby / group sports portal. With some more right people it would have been superb. It had double the features the programmers we had hired for full time couldn't deliver in more than a year. I worked 50% for the uni and programmed a lot during my free time. I learned advanced concepts of AngularJS. I knew how to do fast large scale AngularJS, that's not so obvious from the hello worlds. I created REST API framework extension to PHP on top of Slim/Laravel and OGM (my term: object graph mapping) for Neo4j. That's the most developer friendly database I've ever met. People talk about NoSQL vs SQL but Neo4j is no Mongo. I would love to work with Neo4j still some day. The code I developed was very aesthetic in my mind. Too bad I never had a chance to explain that to anyone. Everyone familiar with netcore, or similar, would understand it fast. The OGM was my masterpiece, I feel like that I somehow understood graph database design very well and how to use the data. The data migration from MySQL to Neo4j was quite an interesting project (Osallistujat.com users were migrated to Hobbydeed with one big bang).

I didn't know how to get money into Hobbydeed and, frankly, that was not my task. We as a company didn't know how to develop features that can be monetized - well we had some, but our sales guy sold pretty much nada. I used some features for which we had transaction based income (well my percentage was 0%) in my sports: we e.g. had the most advanced sales/sign-up system for public competition participation. This is what some other users had told me. UX was too engineering, but that's what it is if it is capable and in my opinion it was intuitive. That's of course wrong opinion but we never had an UX guy hired, so I played one. I made also a licensing system and had Finnish Cycling Union selling licenses and other stuff three years via that. We had recursive organizations, two different ways to delegate permissions / accounts, family calendars etc. Another nice thing we had was a customizable form system lighyear ahead of Google Forms. From money making point of view we were missing some critical features for e.g. licensing (like strong authentication), but we never went to other unions to show and sell our solution. From other points of view than strong authentication and some minor stuff, our solution was superb to Suomi Sport. I knew so well what is needed in this domain of hobbies / sports that I could program without any design and without any specification of features at all. Of course, some thinking could have directed effort towards better stuff. It would have been possible to develop strong authentication etc and try to still take it further, but there was only one who undertood about the tech and there was no salary. So I stopped programming, product owning, running production (I let it run itself) etc for free + I didn't know what it actually would have taken to lift all to the next level. Now after working couple of years in Basware I would know (in my optimistic and unrealistic way) and I also understand now that we didn't have resources and people in other areas either then. So it would have been a dead end anyway.

From the Hobbydeed era, I'm most indepted to Kairi who took care of all the customer service after the first couple of months. Thank you Kairi. I had the portal running that I needed for my hobbies, but I didn't have the burden of CSM that I had in Osallistujat.com for some 11 years. I have no hard feelings, I got the CV that convinced my boss to hire me to Basware after a head hunter had found me. Now I believe that from the work point of view, I will be happy for the rest of my life. And then the life ends. Let's try to live it happily.

It's sad that at the end of March I need to turn of the lights in Azure and take Hobbydeed out. Well, no more pressure solely for me if we have some production issue. I took the virtual machines down, killed the database, emptied the blob stores, deleted the repositories and so on. But I have no hard feelings, I enjoy much more life at Basware, I don't have the burden of something being broken Sunday night. I have colleagues who understand what I'm doing and I can spread my visions and also program computer. That's afterall the most interesting a person can do. Last week was the most enjoyable so far: we had issue with a release that was going to production on Saturday and I could help (a little) to solve that with three of our really top guys and project manager and release manager coordinating the job. I love this kind of situations where something needs to be delivered timely and we know that we can, we just need to do it - and #together.

Couple of funny issues that I'll remember

Once at Osallistujat.com era I got complaints that my password doesn't work. I told that you can reset it. Then, I got more complaints that password resets all the time - that sounds like a bug. After very intensive investigation I found that if you type, say, a to lost password input, all users who had a in their password got password reset. Lesson to learn: There can be any bug in the system.

We went live with Hobbydeed one Saturday. It worked like a charm, but on Sunday evening everything started failing. We never did a load test - with what skills, I didn't have at that time. It appered that the database connections which worked on top of http (in the server) just run out (ports ended). It took some time to understand why. By pure luck from my point of view, Neo4j had introduced bolt connector a little earlier and I managed to change to that and everything worked like a charm. Lesson to learn: run the load tests.

At it's best, after I had stopped development, Hobbydeed, with a code base of about 240 klocs, without any tests, worked for more than a year without any bugs, without any crashing. But who cares about the past anymore, let's look at the future.

Finally, I'm very sorry for the loss of Hobbydeed for all the users. Honestly, I couldn't do anymore for that.