The real meaning after the name “Viblo” and the journey of 5 years of development at Sun*

History of formation

Viblo has been developing since November 2014, from an idea of Mr. Kobayashi Taihei, who was then the COO of Framgia, "building a community where people can freely share IT knowledge in Vietnamese, for Vietnamese people". It is also expected to replace the techblog system of the company, which is built on the rather old Wordpress platform and has many inadequacies.

Viblo borrowed ideas from the Qiita service which was quite popular in Japan at the time (of course it is now more common). The project was originally named ngheroi (on both Redmine and Github) because the word Qiita is pronounced Kiita (キ ー タ), similar to the word 聞 い た (already heard it). Later before the release, the service was given a different name. As a member of the project at the time, Tran Duc Thang came up with the idea of ​​the name iBlo, which stands for IT + Blog, following Apple's trend and learning from one of the largest Blog services in Japan at that time- Ameblo (Ameba Blog) as well. After that, the company's CTO at that time, Mr. Homma Norifumi, suggested that the service was aimed at Vietnamese people and the content was mainly in Vietnamese, so it should add little Vietnamese vibes to the name. Since then, the name Viblo was born with a deep meaning as Vietnam IT Blog.

At first, Viblo was just a project to "test technology", with the desire to find a suitable PHP framework for the company to be widely used for the later PHP development projects. Members of the Viblo development team chose Laravel, which was in version 4.2 at that time. This was the first time for everyone to be able to access to Laravel on a real project, and the first Laravel project of the company. It can be considered that Viblo itself has contributed to Laravel's popularity at Sun* so that almost all of Sun*'s PHP projects currently use this Framework. Laravel is also an option for Viblo's backend to this day.

Many members of the Viblo development team in the early days are still attached to the company to this day, but in new positions. Some of the names are: Mr. Nguyen Thanh Tung D - GL of EUV1, Mr. Nguyen Thanh Tung - GL of EUV2, Mr. Le Duy Khanh - SM of EUV2, Mr. Nguyen Van Vuong - GL of EUV3, Mr. Tran Duc Thang- GL of R&D Unit ...

Viblo officially released on 3/4/2015. After the release, the project was gradually transferred to the BizDev department for development and operation, and its members left the team one by one to develop other projects with customers. For now, you can still review Viblo's history introduction on product releases HERE.

Development process

After the release, Viblo also gained many initial successes. People have started to care more for the content that they have written down. The number of pageview is also increased significantly, compared to the techblog site before. Having many campaigns and awards set out by the company to encourage people to create quality content on Viblo, the development team is also actively adding new features to attract more users. However, it was during that time that Viblo started to show its disadvantages, such as the diffuculty in accessing UX to new users, the poor performance, slow loading of pages, especially at the end of the month, when Framgiaers have a lot of access to writing reports.This led to the situation of hanging the browser while writing or saving, and losing content ... A lot of comments, feedback were given, and people gradually had unfavorable attitude toward Viblo.

In October 2016, Viblo was transferred to Hiroaki Ishida's Products Development Group, with Tran Duc Thang as Team Leader (and later Project Manager), Technical Leader as Roman Kinyakin, and members Truong Hoang Phuong, Nguyen Ngoc Vinh, Aleksandr Melkikh ... This time, Viblo was completely recoded from the beginning, including the backend and frontend code. It was then released on December 29, 2016. Currently, after a series of changes about the company organizational chart, the Viblo Team which is the operating and development team of Viblo products is under the R&D Unit. The current Team Leader of the project is Mr. Nguyen Huu Kim.

Since the end of 2018, Viblo has started to expand its product line, not ju to write articles and share knowledge, but also to become a Platform for Vietnamese programmers, where everyone can share, learn, and practice IT knowledge. In 2019, other services based on Viblo released, like Viblo Code was released in March 2019, Viblo CV was released in May 2019 and Viblo CTF was released in October 2019.

5-year-journey and the future ahead

Viblo first reached 1 million pageviews in one month in May 2018. Currently, the number of pageviews per month of Viblo is about 1.6 ~ 1.7 million. The whole team is trying to reach 2 million pageviews a month in 2020. You may think that most of those pageviews are from the company, but in fact according to the statistics from the months. 10, 11, 12 last year, the number of pageviews from the Sun* office IP only accounted for ... 2% of the total monthly pageviews of Viblo. That's how Sunner's knowledge-sharing articles on Viblo are being well received by many outside programmers.

Besides, up to the end of March, Viblo has about 26,000 verified users, with nearly 27,000 articles shared, 1,300 questions are posed. The number of users who interact on the system (post, comment, ask questions, vote up / down ...) weekly is about 1,000, the number of users who interact monthly is about 2,300. The new Viblo Code and Viblo CTF systems launched last year also achieved 5,500 and 2,500 users, of which nearly 500 users each had at least one exercise.

Currently, in addition to developing new services, Viblo Team is still active in improving the user experience as well as the quality of services in the system to add more highlights to Viblo Platform, and from there, it aims to transform from a "Free service for technical knowledge sharing" (the old Viblo slogan) to an "Ultimate Platform for Learning and Sharing IT Knowledge" (the new slogan of Viblo Platform). The next service in Viblo Platform is expected to be announced by the end of the second quarter of this year.

A big surprise is also being prepared by Viblo Team to release to the community in the near future. It was a series of events to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the release.

Details of this events series will be officially announced on April 3, on Viblo's media channels.

Sun* News will also accompany this Viblo 5 Years Events series to update and bring the hottest news to the Sunner, so everyone please look forward to it.