How do IT professionals work? Dmitry Kravchuk - Technical Director and Co-Founder, LinguaTrip

We continue to question specialists about work and leisure hours, professional habits, the tools they use, and much more.

It will be interesting to find out what unites them, in which they contradict each other. Perhaps their answers will help to identify some general patterns, useful tips that will help many of us.

Today our guest is Dmitry Kravchuk, CTO and co-founder of LinguaTrip . Dmitry’s work schedule is contradictory: he works when he is in a resource state. But at the same time he works almost seven days a week. And here simple life hacks come to his aid.

What do you do in the company?

I am mainly responsible for developing a custom web application and internal systems. I understand how to implement certain business tasks in the code, write the code myself and lead the developers.

But we still have a small company, so I participate in many things: from designing A / B tests to writing articles on a corporate blog.

One word that best describes how you work:

Chaotic.

What to do! There is no other way in a startup.

How many hours a day do you devote to work?

It’s hard to say, I don’t work hour to day. I work all the time when I am awake and when I am able to work productively. This also applies to the weekend.

On the other hand, I do not really believe in the history of Elon Musk and Marissa Mayer about 120-hour work weeks. It is impossible to work effectively for so long.

How many hours do you sleep?

I try to sleep at least 8 hours. Getting enough sleep is the easiest way to increase the amount of productive time per day.

How do you have breakfast?

I definitely have breakfast and without this I just can’t start working. For several months now I have been eating only oatmeal with raisins and cinnamon for breakfast. I will continue until I get tired.

What are you doing along the way to / from work?

This year, I worked in cities from San Francisco to Shanghai, at home, in offices, on trains, airports and hotels. So most often, the way to work for me is the way to a laptop.

Which todo manager do you personally use?

I used to be very used to Clear : a minimum of features and a very nice interface. But now more and more often I just ask Siri to add an entry to the standard Reminders.

What applications and services can you do without?

Of course, the mail client: used mutt before, now Apple Mail. Telegram to communicate with the team. Terminal. Well, standard things - a calendar, maps, browser.

What task manager / issue-tracker / repository do you use in the company?

As a task manager and issue tracker, oddly enough, Trello. This is convenient because not only developers use it. Repositories - Git and TFS.

What tools, frameworks do you use for development?

Tmux, vim, as well as the vim-fireplace for Clojure and Visual Studio for C #.

Does the company have internal projects?

Of the actively used - its own CRM and analytics screwed to it.

What annoys you the most when you work?

When you rush to do something without understanding the situation to the end, and you waste time in vain.

What kind of professional literature would you recommend?

If we talk about development, then too much comes to mind. Programmers generally read too little, although there is a lot of good and time-tested literature. The person who will master the most commonplace Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and Types and Programming Languages ​​will already be head and shoulders above 90% of software developers.

Let me better name three popular, but absolutely useless, in my opinion, books:

• Code Complete (McConnell) . A set of half-obvious, half-highly controversial tips, delivered by the tone of the school teacher.
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (Fowler) . An attempt (successful) to sell a new book with titles to those for whom the list from the Gang of Four is not enough.
• CLR via C # (Richter) . A special tool for interviewing for the position of .NET developer.

Typically, interviewers only ask questions regarding the first half of the book: few people read it to the end.

What do you prefer: electronic readers or paper books?

For a long time I read only electronic books. I have a Kindle Paperwhite now.

What technique and why do you prefer at work and at home?

Basically everything is Apple: phone, tablet, laptop. I have a 2015 MacBook Pro - an almost perfect laptop. Before that, there were several Sony Vaio, but they are no longer released.

What do you listen to when you work?

Depending on the mood and tasks - different music or noisli.com.

Which life hack allows you to be more effective?

Love what you do. Well, get enough sleep.

What professional advice would you give yourself in a letter to the future?

If I knew such advice, I would have followed it.

You have come a long way. And someone is now at the beginning of this path. What would you recommend to a person trying to go the same way?

If you are a developer, do not ignore the world around your code. Always think about the situation around: about your colleagues, users, but most importantly - about the essence of your company’s business. This will make you look more soberly at things, help bring more value and inevitably contribute to your growth.

Constantly evolve. Read articles, books, watch speeches. We are very lucky in the IT field: many of those who have come up with fundamental things are still publishing and speaking at conferences.

And about how to build a company, I'm not ready to give any advice. Probably, you just need to work hard and be lucky enough.