What I built with Python 15 years ago

A good friend asked me;

When the first time you built Python app for organization/client?

HAHAHAH.. then I spent my whole Sunday to find out.. and the answer is.. 15 years ago! here’s the story.

Once upon a time..

In early 2000, Indonesia has a big local (IIX) internet connection with too small content on it. Many people try to hack this situation and one of them was pak Onno W Purbo ¹, he’s one of the Indonesian Technology Expert.

One of his initiatives was creating an Indonesian group discussion or mailing list that is free for everyone, at that time it was competing with YahooGroups, called groups.or.id.

According to Wikibooks of Indonesian Internet History ², the groups.or.id initiated on October 31st, 2003, which is 15 years ago! Nope, you won’t find my name there at Wikibooks, I was just no one which voluntary at that project. 😜

Thanks to Internet Archive ³, I can still see how a website looks like 15 years ago 😂

One of the stack for the groups.or.id site was Mailman ⁴, this was where the Python comes in. Mailman is a superb mailing list manager found in 1999, written in Python.

At these years, when the word startup is a daily consumption for everyone, maybe you have heard about: “find and solve the problem around you, then build a startup.”. Here’s the problem look like ⁵, with a nationwide initiative that asks ALL Indonesian which at that time communicate with email, to join a free local (Indonesian) mailing list.

As you can see, it only needs 15 days for that initiative to hit the scaling problem. Because the just started everything manually, even for the nationwide initiative, they created the mailing list one by one. 🙈

Here’s the thread starter ⁶:

Several persons try to code the solutions, even pak Onno himself ⁷. At that time, many developers fluently code in Perl than Python or PHP. also, here’s the reference of solution from Donny BU ⁸.

And, here’s my solution ⁹, and I think this is the first time I created python app for thousands of users:

Here’s a love letter 💌 from pak Onno on the next day ¹⁰.

Worth to mention that we also translated Mailman to Bahasa Indonesia, the initiative started by Judhi Prasetyo (JPS) ¹⁰. If not mistaken, I just helped to build the translation result ¹¹.

Last but not least, pak P.Y. Adi Prasaja, I always call him pak PY (just like the shortened extension of python), he still mentioned about my work ¹², 3 years later, while working to recover the groups.or.id.

yeah, so happy I still can find those articles on the internet. 😆