Kodingen started with two brothers (Devrim & Sinan) coming together to give something back to developers community.

How did it start? Well, in the summer of 2008 -7 years later than the last time I have developed a web site-, I just wanted to make a website and learn PHP at the same time. I hoped that things would be much faster and smarter than it was 7 years ago. Very soon after, however, I was badly disappointed.

I had to download the zip, I had to unzip it, (it was even more fun with tar.gz) had to have a FTP on the server and a FTP client on my desktop, I had to upload those files after I changed config.inc, I had to have correct database setup and wait until I get everything uploaded (waiting FTP to finish thousand files was the best time to meditate), not to mention, user permissions, apache settings, SVN setup, dealing with hosting companies, going through all sorts of bs and worst of all, every corner you turn, being asked for money. Need hosting? Pay it! $2 for a crappy one, $50 for less crappy one, not good? pay $100 for a dedicated server and dedicate yourself to it’s problems. Call support if your dedication isn’t enough and pay little more. Oh I almost forgot, we just wanted to code right? So you need a code editor? Prices are from $50 to $500. Don’t we all love notepad? Well, it looked like, we all should.

We thought this was unfair as much as it is stupid. Unfair because, we ran an outsourcing company for years, and we saw that what you call ‘affordable’ here, is not affordable ‘there’. What you call a ‘cool gadget’ here, is a dream of many over there. You know where. Stupid because, current process of getting web apps to run, is far behind what can be achieved today.

So if open source is about collaboration and giving developers equal chances, we thought, we could first remove those stupid barriers, uploading, downloading, setting up servers; secondly and most importantly, we felt obliged to do something for those who can only spare a few bucks a month to send it to their families.

I wanted to have a tool like this for myself too. And we decided to get this done.

It’s been almost 9 months since, days and nights.

And here we are with our beta release. We hope while you enjoy using Kodingen, you will take a moment to think, what difference we all can make for those who are not having the resources to make their dreams come true.

This project has no investors, seeded and funded by us. It is not built for hunting VC’s. This is a project that will ask companies to pay fees per user and it will stay free for developers forever with basic features that is enough to get web apps running. We will only require paid-plan if you want to have a lot of storage and traffic, keep-alive domains etc. In any case, our free accounts will always be enough for every developer to go out, develop and make money without worrying about how to get crack software or how to pay for legal software. Our free accounts are not designed to frustrate developers so that they end up paying or leaving; They are designed to make them happy and stay here as long as they want.

Welcome to our community!

Devrim

-on behalf of Kodingen team!

Sinan Yasar – UI Engineer
Devrim Yasar – Lead Developer