What is Rename.kr.ua?

Rename.kr.ua is Onix-Systems’ pet project. It started with a small team:

• Bohdan Stasyuk – co-author who also prepared the information about the renaming of streets
• Dmytro Durach – co-author, organizational support of the project
• Maksym Sinchenko – collection of information about the streets
• Serhii Kholin – management
• Kostyantyn Altukhov – development
• Kostyantyn Svidzinskyi – design

Open data is one of the project’s key ideas. The site engine is publicly available. Anyone can replicate it and create a similar service for their city. The site also features an API one can call to get all renamed streets’ info in a JSON file to be used in other services if needed.

How Rename.kr.ua was created

The website creation was triggered by the decommunization campaign in Ukraine. As the renaming of urban places and streets unfolded, keeping up with the changes became increasingly difficult. Map services often failed to find the necessary address or display street names correctly.

The citizens of Dnipro were the first to understand the need for an online street directory. In 2015, they initiated the creation of Rename.dp.ua after the city authorities approved renaming over 300 objects in several days.

A similar process was only beginning in Kirovohrad (the former name of Kropyvnytskyi). Bohdan Stasyuk, a local history enthusiast, and Onix’s CEO Dmytro Durach decided to create a similar service for our city.

Dmytro introduced Bohdan to Serhii Kholin, Onix’s COO, who ended up managing this project. Bohdan Stasiuk took on the content curation task. Maksym Sinchenko helped him with the most tiresome work – gathering information about persons after whom the streets were renamed. Kostyantyn Svidzinskiy took on the website design, and Kostyantyn Altukhov – the programming.

We created a repository on February 24, 2016, and began building the website. The development took one month. “The company was much smaller back then, so just a couple of desks separated the two Kostyantyns,” Serhii Kholin said.

The main requirements for the website’s design were convenient content consumption and rendering the city’s atmosphere. “The directory was basically a big list, so we needed to simplify its visual perception,” Maksym Kamenshchikov, Onix’s Art Director, explained.

The smart use of colors, fonts, and space between the elements helped achieve a lighter UI design. Improvements to the user experience (UX) included adding autocomplete search and alphabetical order. It enabled people who might not remember a street’s full name to find the desired address quickly.

Rename.kr.ua 2.0

The first decommunization campaign involving street renaming lasted a year and a half. The site was actively populated and used by the townspeople. When the renaming process slowed down, the site continued to run on its own, only requiring support occasionally.

Rename.kr.ua got a new lease on life in early 2022 when the city saw a new massive wave of street renaming.

Volodymyr Gordienko, head of the PHP department, explains: “In February 2022, Serhiy Kholin told me that the website needed our support. It was technically outdated and did not work as fast as we wanted. Administering it had also become troublesome. We decided to build a new service from scratch.”

“We chose PHP/Swoole, an excellent technology, built a new back-end, and implemented modern deployment systems. In short, this made the developers’ lives easier. Then we added an admin panel, online map, feedback system, and other features,” Volodymyr said.

Currently, Rename.kr.ua sees about a hundred users per day. Volodymyr Mikhav oversees its work, as he is in charge of the PHP department’s non-commercial projects.