Hawkee.com: 1997 - ?

Hawkee.com was founded in January 1997 by Scott Aikin and has evolved from an mIRC scripting hub, to a developer social network, and is now a personal portfolio site.

Founder

Scott is a web developer based in Richmond, Virginia (formerly Seattle Area, Washington) who holds a degree in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine.

Site Timeline

1. mIRC Era (1997 - 2002) - The site hosted mIRC scripts and add-ons, MIDI audio files, scripting tutorials, weekly coding challenges, reviews, and lists of shareware/freeware applications.
2. Community & Monetization Shift (2003 - 2004) - Started focusing on an interactive community with member registration and user profiles. Started implementing advertisement networks and affiliate marketing. They even launched their own web-hosting service through myhawkee.com, which operated until 2016.
3. The 'MySpace for Geeks' Pivot (2005 - 2011) - Rebranded as a social network for developers. During this time, the site moved away from mIRC scripting and focused on more mainstream programming languages. The idea was collaborative development and code sharing.
4. Modernization, Snippets, & RotorBuilds (2012-2023) - Cancelled support for full script downloads and started focusing on code snippets. Around 2015, Scott started dedicating most of his time on First-Person View drone builds, hardware configurations, and custom setups. This grew into it's own standalone platform at RotorBuilds.com .
5. Present Day (2024 - 2026) - The site temporarily shut down siting concerns over automated spam and bots. However, as of writing this, the site has been brought back online but acts as a personal portfolio for Scott. It currently lists all his active projects.

Images

Sources

GitHub LinkedIn Techcrunch Crunchbase