How do IT professionals work? Konstantin Osipov, developer and founder of the Tarantool project

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    We continue to question specialists about work and leisure routines, 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 Konstantin Osipov, developer, founder and project manager of Tarantool. Konstantin told how he manages to combine the post of software developer with the position of manager. He also shared his list of references.

    What do you do in the company?

    I write code, do reviews, discuss tasks with the guys. That is, on the one hand, I perform the functions of a developer.

    On the other hand, I give reports, give interviews. Today I couldn’t tell a lot, I stammered. Therefore, after the report, I was very angry with myself.

    On the third hand, I'm still a manager. I need to help develop and grow many people who have associated themselves with the project, because for them it is still a career. And for this it is necessary that the project itself develops.

    How do you work? What are you at work?

    I am a very addicted person, but I have a healthy share of laziness. The tasks that I solve as a manager require multitasking. And development on the contrary requires immersion. For some time it was hard for me to combine this. I work from home two days a week. I come to the office mainly for discussions, meetings and other work with people. And at home, I can just do the development. If I can’t get involved in the development, write code, then I start to drop out of the process. And I need participation in order to develop the project. Therefore, you have to switch.

    This is an interesting story, because many familiar managers are skeptical. They say: “While you are coding, you will not achieve a good development of the project. We need to devote all our time to managerial tasks. ”

    But I know that many of the founders of database development projects continue to write code. Or, if you recall, for example, Linus ... he is coding. And no one says that Linux is developing poorly because of this.

    How many hours a day do you devote to work?

    Unfortunately, the average is 10 hours. It’s not pleasant for me to say this. I’m not sure that it takes so much time.

    How many hours do you sleep?

    7.5-8 hours.

    Are you having breakfast

    In the morning I eat oatmeal. We prepare breakfast for the whole family. We have two kids. One child at first refused oatmeal. But then he got used to it (smiles).

    Does it take a lot of time on the road?

    This is a big problem for me. I have always been a fan of efficiency. Work from home is part of this. I am trying to reduce all unnecessary activities in my life. Everything should be as effective as possible.

    We now live in South-West, and working at the Airport is about an hour by metro. By car, worse. At first I was very angry that I was wasting this hour. But now I began to watch lectures in the subway when I was on my way. And sometimes I ride a bike. For 6 years of work, I found a route that goes first along the bike path (to Vernadsky), then along the general road, and then again along the bike path. Surprisingly, it takes no longer on a bicycle than on a car in traffic - 1.5 hours.

    What do you do on the way to / from work?

    Most often I listen to audio books. I have an Audible subscription.

    Which todo manager do you personally use?

    vi. I tried Evernote, now I try Google Voice: say OK, Google. Make a note. And he takes a note.

    I recently read one science fiction book, The Pandora's Star. There is such a super intelligence that you need to interact with. Probably, Google also read it and understood what needs to be done with their voice services. But for now I don’t really like them. Therefore, all the same, vi.

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

    Completely on Github, and that answers all the questions. All planning goes through it. And if it’s a particularly difficult task, we describe it in Google Docs. Then you can convert it to a wiki.

    Before that, we were at Launchpad, from Canonical (these are the same guys that make Ubuntu). They have abandoned him now. But at one time this was a convenient thing, only for Bazaar, not Git: for example, there were such interesting things as blueprints.

    What tools, frameworks do you use for development?

    Several developers on the team use Clion, others use Sublime. In addition, there is a corporate Mail.Ru JIRA, Confluence. We use Travis CI, Concourse CI. Before that, we had Buildbot.

    Of the tools for debugging performance, we use Google Perf, Intel VTune. It is difficult to say that we use only the best tools, rather for each case we are looking for something that is best suited from the available.

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

    We have both successful and unsuccessful cases. In version 1.7 we make a disk store. It appeared as an internal project, but turned out to be inoperative. I had to rewrite everything.

    And there are cases that just shoot. One of our developers made a functional programming library in Lua. It works well with LuaJIT, it supports all functional programming primitives. She became an independent project, she has a lot of fans.

    We also made a set of tools to automatically build packages in Travis. This thing is called PackPack . It’s very convenient that in Github it can be connected to the project with one line.

    In addition, we use Package Cloud: this service takes over the function of hosting repositories. They have an open source modest plan, but in general, if we could store all our packages in this cloud, it would be great. But while it is very expensive. A Travis CI supports us as an open source project for free.

    What annoys you the most when you work?

    I am a very emotional person, and any thing that does not work out will turn me on very much. If we talk about work - a lot of annoying.

    As a person, I am increasingly confronted with my personal limitations. It really upsets me.

    What kind of professional literature would you recommend?

    There is such a thing - Library Thing. This is a site where you can post read books and reviews on them. I have an account there. You can go there and see what I read recently .

    Now I mainly read about IT management. Regarding Computer Science ... there are many new algorithms that we did not go to university before. There are, for example, Randomized Algorithms (1995) by Rajeev Motwani.

    Speaking of classics, there is a gentleman's set - for example, Introduction to Algorithms , 3rd Edition (MIT Press) by Thomas H. Cormen and others.

    By Compiler - Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (2nd Edition) by Alfred V. Aho and Engineering a Compiler(Second Edition) by Keith Cooper.

    According to databases - this is a book by Ulman, Garcia-Malina ... Quite an interesting book.

    What do you prefer: electronic readers or paper books?

    I have a Kindle. A couple of times I drowned the Kindle in the pool, a pool - I used it quite actively. But this is not a substitute for wooden books. Now it happens that there are no books in electronic form, but I love books that have been tested by time. If the book is in pdf, or is it something new, read it in Kindle.

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

    I have Linux both at home and at work. Ubuntu 16. In general, I don’t need anything from Linux. 10 years ago would be enough for me. I would like a terminal and a browser.

    Enrages Open Office: you have to make a lot of slides in it. This project in its entire history has not become stable. Today, for example, copy-paste of one slide took me several seconds.

    In terms of mobile devices, I chose Android. I have a Lenovo phone with a huge heavy battery.

    Do you listen to music when you work?

    Previously, there was a negative attitude to music during work, but work in the office changed that. Now I constantly listen in the background of chillstep, trip-hop, Aquarium (BG).

    Which life hack allows you to be more effective?

    The main trick is to constantly “tune” your habits. You need to constantly look for ineffective habits and burn them out.

    Let's say you're dumb on Facebook. You need to understand why. I was dragged into the network by Mark Calahan. He writes cool articles there, he must be read. So I ended up on Facebook. But all the extra time spent there, I burn with fire.

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

    I use taxi services - usually Uber. This radically changed my life, because you plan your day differently. I also want a taxi without drivers. Then it would be even cheaper and you could not have your own car at all. I also use cards, of course. Most often it is maps.me.

    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 I were myself 20 years ago, and would have heard myself now, I most likely would not have understood. People like Steve Jobs say very cool things, much better than me: "Stay hungry, try to achieve more." You just need to be able to understand them correctly.

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