Pavel Durov

What was worse is that since we became popular, somebody started to do DDoS attacks on us, as it always happens.

Right.

And then we had people that wanted to buy a share of VK.

And interestingly, every time we had a negotiation day, the DDoS attacks intensified.

So we had to come up with a way to fight it.

I remember having many sleepless nights trying to figure it out.

Unfortunately, if we didn't have bad actors and pressure, it would be the best job ever.

You just get to create.

Yeah, so at that stage I could do the basic stuff.

I could understand how I implement scalability into the code base, how I shorten my tables in the database, where I include memcached instead of direct memcached.

requests to the database.

That was quite easy because it was still PHP back in the day.

When my brother got back from Germany, somewhere around 2008,

I asked him, can we make it even more efficient?

Can we make it super fast and at the same time so that we would require even fewer servers to maintain the load?

And he said, yes, but PHP is not enough.

I'll have to rewrite a big part of your data engines in C and C++.

I said, okay, let's do that.

He invited...

the friend of his, helped him, another absolute champion in world's programming contest twice in a row.