It looks like DirectFlow has a CTO now. And you’ll never guess who it is.

Back in 2012, when KazNet was going through a boom in blogging platforms, this person and I started building our own. A new one. From scratch.

We had actually known each other for years before that, long before we ever started building anything together.

Tumblr had a huge influence on me at the time, and our project was fundamentally built around a similar idea. Content wasn’t organized only by categories or tags, but primarily by type: text, photo, video, quote, and so on.

For its time, we designed Tumble.kz to be pretty modern. Mostly because we looked at the best blogging platforms out there and took the ideas we liked. Looking through the archives now, you can actually see pretty clearly which platform influenced which part of what we built.

Each blog could have its own custom domain or subdomain. You could add a badge for an app, project, or pretty much anything else to your profile. The interface was planned to support three or more languages from the start. You can also see a separate Follow button in those old photos. I was a pretty active Twitter user back then, so I’m guessing that’s where the idea of “follow” came from.

In general, we could build pretty much anything we wanted. Because we were building everything from scratch.

The code was written and the server was maintained by the person who now, apparently, is becoming DirectFlow’s CTO.

That ability to build the whole system ourselves was one of the things that really set us apart from most other blogging platforms in KazNet at the time, which were largely built on ready-made CMSs like LiveStreet. When you own the whole system, you get to decide how that system should work.

People in KazNet noticed that difference. Product-wise, we really did see things a little differently from everyone else.

Then I left the international media company I was working for, and somehow our paths went separate ways. I left the KazNet blogosphere, moved into information security and cybersecurity, spent around six years there, studied law, got married, quit my job, moved to Astana, and became a professional podcaster. Since then, I’ve studied podcasting pretty deeply, and that had a huge influence on the eventual emergence of DirectFlow.

A couple of days ago, I ran into one of the fundamental questions behind DirectFlow and realized I couldn’t properly answer it on my own. Even AI couldn’t help anymore, which was surprisingly impressive.

I needed someone who understands the internet, understands the actual problem DirectFlow is trying to solve, and has known me long enough that we could argue about the substance instead of the wording.

Around the same time, I reinstalled a bunch of social media apps because I wanted to see how notifications work there these days, and I started posting random thoughts on Facebook.

For example:

I officially have 1.2K followers on Facebook. I make a post, and I’m lucky if even 10 people see it. So what’s the point of having 1.2K followers? Think about it: people followed me, yet they don’t see my new posts. Hello? Does this really make sense?

And then Abzal showed up in the comments. From there, things escalated quickly.

We got on a call. I told him what DirectFlow is, why I’m building it, and what fundamental problem I’m trying to solve. And the most interesting part was that I barely had to explain the problem itself.

He got it.

Because it seems that even back in 2012, we were interested in the same basic question: what happens when you’re not dependent on someone else’s platform and can decide for yourself how the system should work?

Back then, we were building our own blogging platform because we wanted to decide for ourselves how publishing on the internet should work. Now we’ve found each other again around a different question: how should the connection between a creator and a person who once clicked Follow actually work?

Fourteen years later, we’re once again looking at the way the internet currently works, thinking, “Something here is wrong,” and once again we have a chance to build our own system from scratch. Only this time, it’s DirectFlow.

So yes. Abzal is joining DirectFlow as co-founder and CTO. And now for a few funny coincidences.

We’re both immigrants now. We both have two kids. We both speak at least three languages. And we originally met years before Tumble.kz, at one of the very first BarCamps in Almaty — back when BarCamp was still organized by Yelena and Inessa. A big hello to both of them. I was also the best man at Abzal’s wedding. So there are plenty of strange coincidences in this story.

The funniest part is something else. Fourteen years later, we’re building together again.

Photos taken by me on July 23, 2012, with my HTC Desire S. Sourse my Flickr albums: https://www.flickr.com/photos/95060995@N03/albums