“I want to leave the factory on the web” - 10 questions for a programmer, issue 8

Remember, three years ago one guy wrote a super-popular article about how he made games in the army out of boredom. This is Anatoly ( oWart ), a graduate of the National Research University "MEI". Now he is 27, he lives in Smolensk, works as a design engineer, raising a two-year-old daughter. In the new issue of 10 questions to the programmer his answers - what is wrong with space, rocket production and work at the plant, and why electronics specialists dream of the web.

1. Tell about the feature that you have implemented and that you are proud of.

Once I took part in a mission to save the Russian cosmonautics. You can’t tell a lot, but I’ll still not believe what I’ll tell you ...

It was interesting here, but bad uncles came and banned everything

... On top of that, the military has a mad bureaucracy.

2. And now - about the most cruel fakap

On the main work fakapy not remembered. The development cycle of electronic devices is very extensive, with a bunch of tests, and any fact is somehow corrected at a quiet pace and does not critically affect further work. Well, I turned on the 12V device in the 220V network - the RCD operated, the room was aired from smoke, that's all.

The most cruel fakap happened to me in the army. We carried combat duty mainly at night, and the brain often went to sleep at the most inopportune moment. Once I fell asleep right from the game I was working on open on the monitor. Naturally at this moment the inspection officer came in ...

It was a notable aerial. I did not touch the computer during the service. Well, none of the officers never guessed that I myself wrote these games, and there were about a dozen of them there.

3. Describe your working space: from the chair and monitor to programming environments and favorite utilities

Well, what can be the working space at the factory: an ordinary office chair and two tables with the letter “G”. Computer - stationary middling: Intel Core i3 3.60GHz 4GB of RAM with two 19 "monitors. Secondary equipment necessary for a design engineer: a cool oscilloscope with Windows on board, a soldering station, several power sources and multimeters.



At home and on business trips I work on an old HP Pavilion dv6, but in my heart I dream of a Mac. I like everything to work out of the box, and Apple’s technology is probably the best with it. Besides, I plan to go to the web, and I got the impression that the majority of people work on Makkah. I want to touch the beautiful th, but still can not afford.

From programming environments I like and use IAR Embedded Workbench for microcontrollers and Visual Studio Code for Go and JS. For side projects as CAD systems for printed circuit boards I use Eagle, for work exclusively OrCad.

4. On what basis do you choose a job? Stack, product, living conditions, money?

First of all, I am eager to work on what I find interesting. When the eyes are burning, the sea is knee-deep - you live the project day and night, the time ceases to be divided into work and personal. That's the kind of job I want. Diverse and interesting, I want to make a real product and see how it develops ... and not read the guests to the holes.

My destiny took shape according to the classic scenario for many: I stayed to work where I did my internship while studying at the institute. Besides, where could I, the "green", go immediately after studying and serving in the army? And here it was already a heated place with a salary higher than the regional average. We must pay tribute to the plant: in the first three years my salary has doubled, but then the growth slowed down and I got a little bored, and from this the web craze grew.

It may sound loud, but I want to leave the factory and become a backend developer. But we must not leave somewhere, but somewhere, but for now we have nowhere to go. In Smolensk, with work in IT is very deaf, and I do not consider the move now - it keeps the family and the mortgage. So far I have been gaining experience on personal projects and are considering options for remote work.

I do not want to remain an expert in a narrow field of gas analysis technology and be tied to my place of work until the end of my life. My wife recently said to me: “Let's move on ...?” But where can I go, having experience in developing only gas analyzers ?! I do not want to be tied to the place of work, I want to be able to change jobs and relocate. I want to grow, develop, earn more in the end. And I think the web is very attractive in this regard.

It seems to me that on the web there is more room for self-realization, a greater pace of technology development, in the end, the same electronics becomes closely connected with the web ... Only now our plant lags far behind this world.

5. What would you like to fix in the technologies and languages ​​you use?

Error handling in Go and cross-browser compatibility of JS and CSS.

Explicit error handling in Go is certainly excellent, but it is very cumbersome and ugly, it turns out in code, often just a formal check. But this is already promised to change in Go2, we are waiting.

Well, working with JS and CSS is always very tight for me. I don’t understand how to achieve cross-browser compatibility, there are some crutches everywhere. Literally the other day there was a setup: I showed the customer a project page on Vue, and we wanted to look at it from an iPhone, and there “NaN.NaN.NaN” was displayed on all pages instead of the date. Just the function of parsing the date in Safari did not work as in other browsers. It seems a trifle, but not nice.

In general, my soul to JS does not lie. And here I recently saw the phrase “the main problem of Javascript is you”: he smiled and thought that this was for sure about me. Although the language itself is definitely cool, it is the browser zoo that is upsetting.

6. Where better to adopt someone else's experience - in high school, on konfy, on Habré? Somewhere else?

I enjoy visiting mitapy. Perhaps simply because they make a great impression on me, a man from the backwoods. Cool furnishings of modern offices, armchairs, pears, free cookies and competent interviewees. It is in such a place you want to come after a hard day’s work and listen to cool and smart guys.

Just the other day I signed up for online participation in Slurm (intensively by Kubernetes), I hope to learn new knowledge in the field of DevOps and make new acquaintances.

I often go to work in Moscow and try to combine business trips with meetings. Somehow I really wanted to get a konfu on DevOps, but my trip was confirmed too late, when there were no more seats left. I wrote to Antonina Tatchuk ( rafinirovannoe) - her contact remained with me after I picked up the gift won in this post at Avito's office .

I just asked her for help, and she through my colleagues put me on the lists. So I express my special thanks to her.

7. If you had unlimited resources (time, money, power, people), what project would you do?

I would open a business with some consumer goods or services and sharpen business processes to the ideal, transferring the business more and more to IT. Then the success of Fedor Ovchinnikov, the founder of Pizza DoD, does not give me peace: it seems that the catering market is overcrowded and the competition is overwhelming, but he managed to do the impossible and bring the company to the world level through perfectly aligned business processes and wide integration with IT. I think in the coming years we will see many more such examples, when a young company is pushing out long-term industry leaders from the market.

8. How do you relax? What are you doing besides work?

In general, I try to spend more time with my family. My daughter has a year and nine months - a very funny age, I think it is important not to miss this time. Now I became interested in aircraft modeling, I began to buy up some small things to assemble my first plane. It has long been a dream to fly with FPV glasses.

But in general, I have a period that is not up to rest. I work a lot and constantly learn. The last two months actively tightened knowledge of SQL, solved problems on sql-ex, just recently received a basic certificate. In the middle of last year I got to know and was very imbued with the Go language, I took courses in the basics, since then I have been constantly writing server applications on it. I want to associate my future work with him.
On Saturdays I also work, mainly on a side project: a device for smart management of street lighting with a server part on Go and a client one on Vue.

In the last interviewthe guy mentioned that he worked 10 hours a day plus weekends, so he was immediately attacked with criticism. What to do if you really decided to radically change your life? For the last three years, I have been working no less, and somewhere even more and not always in business: there was a frankly difficult financial period when I had to tax at night to close another mortgage payment without harming my daughter in diapers. I must say it is great tempers. In general, we have to “catch up the lost background” at the cost of our own comfort, and this is absolutely normal. During these few years I have almost completely lost touch with all my friends, deeply immersed in work for the benefit of my future and the future of my family.

Someday I dream of acquiring a plot of land and starting to build a domed house - a kind of designer for men. I consider the construction a unique area with a bunch of interesting moments.

9. Tell about three favorite books - educational, popular science and art.

I would like to mention Martin Kleppman's book “Highly loaded Applications”, which I myself began to read quite recently, but I already see it for myself as a kind of best practices almanac for the next six months (probably, the book is very large, but I'm not in a hurry). I hope after reading it my understanding of the field of web development will increase significantly.

Somehow I didn’t work with popular science books. I can not cite as an example a single book that I would have read, and which I somehow remember.

But on the other hand, I was greatly impressed by several books from the field of business literature: Maxim Kotin’s books “Chichvarkin E… genius”, “And botanists do business” (just about Fedor’s story before the founding of the pizzeria) and “Paragraph”, which he is writing at the moment and even recently made an announcement on it on Habré. I like his style and the areas that he reveals in the books.

Of the artistic ones, the last one impressed me was the “Green Mile” by Stephen King. In general, I love the book + movie combinations very much. At one time I read and looked at a lot of such couples, and I have a positive opinion about almost all of them.

10. If a consciousness wakes up right in front of you in AI, what will you tell him?

I would ask him to reflect on the meaning of being. Sometimes I myself get a little stuck in such thoughts, it would be interesting to hear his opinion.

Question from previous hero

If your personal project were to be fired, and you would become the head of a new IT giant, describe where your headquarters would be and how it looked.

It's hard to say, but probably it would be a cool campus somewhere in California. If this is truly an IT giant, then this will be a good place for headquarters. I was there and I really liked it.

And so there is a dream to work with a laptop, sitting on the green grass, to move around the territory on the electric scooter and to be near the sea or ocean. In general, I am attracted to the atmosphere of modern cool offices: all these comfortable zones with ottomans, games, etc ... everything is somehow at home.

Bonus: ask a question to another developer

What would you do in an intergalactic expedition lasting several generations?