Between 2016 and 2021, I worked in the dating industry — a high-traffic, high-load ecosystem with millions of users, thousands of daily interactions, complex marketing funnels, and an infrastructure running across over 150 sites. This period shaped my understanding of large-scale systems more than anything before it.
This part of my timeline isn’t a portfolio entry —
it’s a story, an experience, and in many ways, an initiation.
The dating world looks simple from the outside.
In reality, it is anything but.
Behind the images and profiles lies a massive, brutal, non-stop machine:
hundreds of thousands of active users
6.5 million accounts in our system
millions of interactions every single day
— chats, gifts, private messages, live feeds
payment systems like cCBill, with their own layers of restrictions
moderation, screening, redirect flows
and a traffic load that crushes anything unprepared
This is not “a dating site”.
This is a distributed digital organism.
At any given moment, I was responsible for:
10 core dating sites
3 full affiliate programs
and around 150 niche sites used for traffic filtering, routing, segmentation, and load balancing
Everything had to sync, update, and work seamlessly.
No downtime.
No excuses.
At that time, cloud platforms were nowhere near where they are today.
So everything — everything — ran on bare metal servers.
This is where I learned the difference between:
nginx and Apache2
optimized routing vs. blind request handling
real load vs. theoretical load
controlled traffic vs. firehose chaos
And now I can confidently say:
👉 nginx won that war hands down.
This industry taught me:
how auto-funnels are built
how they convert
how users move inside a multi-step environment
how to craft flows for different demographics
how to run mass email campaigns to 6 million subscribers without hitting spam filters
how A/B testing works at scale
how live traffic is segmented and monetized in real time
It’s a level of marketing sophistication that normal, “peaceful” internet platforms never experience.
And yet it works. Every day.
One of the engines behind that ecosystem was the affiliate network:
250,000 affiliates
traffic 24/7, pouring in constantly
redirections, screening, scoring, filtering
automated payouts
constant anti-fraud logic
and an internal economy built on routing value
And the most impressive part —
👉 it all worked like a well-tuned machine.
I knew the system inside out.
I knew how it scaled.
I knew how it broke.
I knew where it was strong —
and where it was frighteningly fragile.
At some point it became clear:
👉 the system could be improved — not just maintained.
And that’s exactly what I did.
The improvements I built during those years eventually became:
Tour Rotator
Dating.Center
CMSXL DSE (Content Management System Extra Large with Digital Space Engine)
And CMSXL DSE later evolved into…
👉 the architectural core of QRaway.
What started in the dating industry —
routing logic, content flows, scoring, segmentation, load resilience —
all of it lives inside QRaway today, in a transformed form.
These five years weren’t a detour.
They were a forge.
A place where architecture, psychology, marketing, infrastructure, and raw traffic reality fused into one.
👉 Dating didn’t just influence my work — it changed my entire approach to building systems.
It wasn’t a project.
It wasn’t a job.
It was a turning point —
and a hell of a ride.
I’m genuinely glad I went through it.
It’s the kind of experience you never forget.
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