Ovkuse

I helped maintain and develop the community as a lead engineer, owning both product delivery and the technical foundation for scale. I also implemented a few significant projects:

Improve workflow and stability

Ovkuse started in 2008 as a simple Wordpress blog with a handful of recipes. Over the next 9 years it grew into one of the largest cooking communities in Russia. I introduced version control for source code, created automated tests to ensure new changes didn’t break the site, and integrated logging and error reporting. These changes gave the team a reliable release process instead of hero-driven deployments.

Improve recipe posting with ML

When posting a recipe, authors had to manually choose a category and sub-category. With dozens of categories and over a hundred sub-categories, this was frustrating. I built a backend that analyzes the recipe title in real time using machine learning and suggests relevant categories, making the posting process much smoother. This was an early ML feature that balanced UX improvements with operational simplicity.

Optimize Wordpress for heavy traffic

During the Christmas season Ovkuse sees a huge spike in visitors. I optimized Wordpress to handle 500K+ hits per day, focusing on caching, database tuning, and infrastructure reliability.

Redesign

Ovkuse had two main sections: the community and the recipe database, which used different CMSs (InstantCMS and Wordpress). They looked inconsistent, and the recipes section had a separate mobile theme. We decided to build one common responsive theme for all sections. I converted designer layouts to responsive HTML using reusable components and integrated them with Wordpress and InstantCMS. I also created a style guide for CSS and JS so the team could keep evolving the UI consistently.