Historically Ukraine is an “aviation country”, and many of the worldwide events in aviation history happened here or were somehow linked to Ukraine.

This led to the birth or relatively large community of aviation enthusiats, mostly photographers. The community didn’t have their own site and photographers were displaying their works on popular spotters sites like airliners.net, jetphotos.net etc.

The obvious step for them was to build their own site. It happened in 2007 when the first version was deployed on a local provider’s server.

This is a photo site, so the most attention was focused on image processing; files uploaded on the site should be processed perfectly.

Another problem was limited resources; the site quickly become quite popular working on outdated hardware. Constant optimizing of virtually every component of the system was our everyday job.

After years of our joined effort spotters.aero has became the biggest aviation photo site in the Eastern Europe. The site is a source of photo and video for media all round the world.

This is exciting to build a system from scratch and see how it grows day after day and getting a really popular resource, heavy loaded and technicaly complicated.

Now we are responsible for further development and support, adapting site to new browsers and technologies.