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Fought ad blockers

as Chief Technology Officer at stealth startupfor ~3 years in around 2016

What I did

  • Built a system that prevented adblockers from … blocking ads
  • Our product processed existing advertisement inventory in real-time, making it unblockable, without damage to RTB/VAST performance and loss of conversion
  • Designed the architecture, developed core code, managed developers, Ops, UX and QA specialists
  • Dealt with CI/CD, built pipelines, migrated from delivery via Debian packages to containers
  • Studied the life patterns of a local AdBlock list maintainer and timed our updates to the hours when he couldn’t react, which is a totally normal thing to do

What I achieved

  • A working product
  • A system that could process millions of users on the cheapest hardware
  • A place in hell, probably, for making the internet worse

What I learned

  • A lot about the intricacies of RTB, DMP and other evil technologies
  • How to build high-load things that must respond in under 25 ms

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