How do IT professionals work? Maxim Lapshin, founder of Flussonic

    imageWe 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 Maxim Lapshin, founder of Flussonic. He has a rather categorical view of how a businessman in IT should be. But even more interesting is his attitude to the phrase “good software engineer”.



    What do you do in the company?

    Now I am the technical director of the company. Still developing, but less than before. In addition, we have to deal with development and promotion.

    The company is small, so there are so many things to do. The more delegation they manage, the better.

    We are not an investment startup, we are a bootstrap company: we are developing at our own expense. Our team is not too structured yet.

    How many hours a day do you devote to work?

    The wife believes that 24 hours a day (laughs). Well, I think that the hours are 11-12.

    How many hours do you sleep?

    I try to have 8 hours of sleep.

    Are you having breakfast

    Yes, otherwise I will already become angry and annoyed by dinner. Usually in the morning I take the child to the garden and immediately go to the cafe, eat porridge. Then - to the sport, if necessary.

    Does it take a lot of time to get to the office?

    I live in Zelenograd, so it takes a little time - 10 minutes.

    What do you do on the road when you have to make long trips?

    If traveling by car, she takes all the attention to herself. If I can, for example, go to Moscow not by car, but by train, then I just "sit" in the laptop.

    Which todo manager do you personally use?

    I have a system specially developed by us that helps me not to forget about very important things - write to a client or perform other important tasks for the whole company.

    Usually, when I get to work in the morning, I write out for myself the things that need to be done today. Then I try to solve them sequentially, gradually being distracted by what “pops up” in the process. If you can make two-thirds of this list, that's good. Then, looking back, I realize that some things in themselves budded. It is important to be able to let go of some things: I thought that it would be necessary, and then it turns out that their importance was overrated.

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

    We use Gitlab. We do not use Issue-tracker: it is inconvenient for us. Instead, we have a regular Redmine for programmers as well as a wiki.

    And communication with customers occurs through our self-written "ticket", which stores all-all-all for 4 years of our company.

    What tools, frameworks do you use for development?

    Sublime Code Editor, Git Repository, Erlang IDE. We have nothing more. We tried to use Bitrix, but it didn’t work out: it goes against our workflows.

    Does your department have any internal projects, libraries, and why were they created?

    Yes, we automate a lot in our work, and this is not the code that we sell. In addition to the ticket store, we have a self-made billing. There we keep records of all money received from customers. It is written on "rails".

    I believe that every company should write such things on its own. To look for ready-made solutions, to expect from someone else that this will be done for you, in my opinion, is pointless.

    But we try not to produce unnecessary things, so as not to support them later.

    What annoys you the most when you work?

    Annoying own ignorance of those things that allow you to achieve your goals. When the goal becomes clear, an image of what you want to build appears in your head, but it is not known what steps you need to take to do this: there is a feeling of helplessness. And this feeling annoys everyone.

    What equipment (computers, tablets, smartphones) and operating systems do you prefer at work and at home?

    I myself have been working on Mac computers since 2007. Since 1999, I have only worked with Linux. Almost everyone, including administrative staff, has Mac OS or Linux in our office. One person who does paperwork has Windows: she needs Microsoft Word. This sometimes causes problems.

    Do you listen to music when you work?

    Strongly not listening. Otherwise I’ll get lost. This is very hindering the work. If someone in the office wants to listen to music, let him buy closed headphones.

    Which life hack allows you to be more effective?

    I won’t say anything special. The main thing is to constantly focus on what is important. When you build a company, there are a huge number of things that just need to be done. In fact, time is extremely short. Eight working hours is nothing at all when you start doing more than one thing.

    While I was just a programmer, it seemed that you can do a lot of work in one working day. Now I can make a list of 11 cases. This means that for every business I have 30 minutes, and I still have to have lunch.

    Therefore, you have to throw something away, focus on the main thing. And for this it is important to understand what the company does, what its values ​​are, and how what you do is built into the values ​​of this company.

    Another important task is to learn how to delegate. Anyone will tell you that this is difficult: at first there is always a failure in the speed of work, but this is a common story.

    What applications and services can you do without in work or in your personal life?

    First of all, this is a payment solution by Modulbank. This is probably the best thing that has happened with the banking system over the past 50 years. If they were not there, then it is generally easier to officially shut down and go to "sulfur."

    What would Maxim Lapshin write 10 years ago in a letter to the future to himself?

    I would give advice: if you want to achieve something big and important, the most important thing for a programmer is to focus not on what you can do, but on what people need. Indeed, in the end, money earning boils down to the fact that people do not buy what they do not need.

    Therefore, you need to think about other people, think about what value you bring them. When you sit and work as an ordinary programmer, it is quite difficult to understand. It may be clear in words, but in fact - not everything is so simple.

    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?

    I am not ready to give advice on how to build my business. This must go through yourself. But I can give advice to someone who wants to connect themselves with computers, programming, and everything else.

    A good engineer is one who does not care what to write on. An engineer who says that he writes only, for example, in Java, is not a first-class specialist. My team has people to whom I give everything from exotic Julia to fixing iOS code.

    All such specializations are a matter of momentary knowledge. After all, after six months, they erode, and a deeper, general understanding remains.

    This is even more important for those who want to connect life not only with programming, but with the near-programming business. When I was still working at Evil Martians, we collaborated with Darberry, and Oleg Kozyrev, the director of the company, talked to us. Despite the fact that he was a manager, he brought us several times the code that he wrote, launched, tested, and as a result, it all worked for him. He did not shy away from such work. Although this man is still a businessman. He is doing Rocket Bank now, by the way.

    Therefore, in my opinion, to be an IT businessman, it is better to be able to program.

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