How do IT professionals work? Oleg Bartunov, Postgres Professional

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 Oleg Bartunov, CEO of Postgres Professional. In 2015, Oleg and his team raised several million US dollars to create a domestic vendor, PostgreSQL.

What do you do in the company?

Firstly, I am engaged in strategy, forming an idea of ​​what needs to be done. Secondly, I still try to take part in the development. At least at the level of testing what the guys are doing and developing a roadmap.

I also deal with promotion issues. In general, the whole complex of tasks for which I have enough time. A lot of time is spent on promotion. I used to speak at conferences a lot, and now even more: we need to promote our developments and communicate with people. I speak at Russian and international conferences. After all, we are not just a company, we are members of the international PostgreSQL community. And as a company, we must participate everywhere.

One word (phrase) that best describes how you work:

Development.

There are no ready-made recipes to follow. We need to develop them ourselves. There are not many companies in Russia that built a business on open source, especially on such a large system project.

I think that people are following with interest the development of our project. Previously, there was no PostgreSQL vendor in Russia, now our company is a Russian vendor, we provide a full range of services from development to support. We pay a lot of attention to issues of education, we want to create a sub-building industry in Russia, which is now practically absent.
How many hours a day do you devote to work?

Probably about 15 hours.

How many hours do you sleep?

6 o'clock. True, this is not enough.

Are you having breakfast

I eat breakfast. I have a little daughter who needs to be taken to kindergarten in the morning. I get up at 6:30 in the morning, have breakfast, have the opportunity to talk a little, then I take her to kindergarten, sometimes I run in our park and go to work.

What do you do on the way to / from work? Does it take a lot of time on the road?

Sometimes I read mail, news and so on, and sometimes I can just relax. The road takes about 20-30 minutes. It happens that I take a taxi when I need to relax and think about something. This will not be possible at home: you need to deal with children.

Which todo manager do you personally use?

I did not find the perfect one. Only the head. I have a good property - the ability to keep a goal in my head for a long time.

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

We have JIRA, Confluence and GitLab. For public projects, we use github.

What working environment are you using? Frameworks, other third-party products?

We write in C without using frameworks. We have hardcore S.

Do you have any internal projects in your department and why were they created?

One internal project is our website, there are educational projects. We have our seminar at which both our employees and external invited speakers speak.

So you have a system of courses, internships at all levels?

Yes. People come to give reports. Other people write, we send them feedback. We also conduct field seminars. 12 times this year, they taught three-day courses in cities. After all, there is no such industry - the DBMS structure, so you have to create it yourself.

What annoys you the most when you work?

Braking. And other people, and her own. We live in a society where you need to respond quickly (there is such a term Context Switch). Because of this, people lose purpose. It seems to them that they are doing something, but in fact, they stand still and switch all the time. In the end, the challenge is to move forward. Therefore, you need to keep your goal far: today, tomorrow, a month, two months, and so on.

It is very difficult to find such people who can independently work (not only design a project and carry it out, lead it). All the time people have to push, guide. This is the problem of our life.

What kind of professional literature would you recommend?

It so happened that I did not read such books. I came out of that generation of people who wrote these books themselves. I myself have not written, by the way. When we started working, there was nothing and we had to learn everything from scratch. I can recommend the Stanford course in database technology. Unfortunately, we don’t have ours, but we are working on it and are going to release it under a free license so that our universities can use it and take part in its development.

What do you prefer: electronic readers or paper books?

Both that, and that. I read fiction completely on the phone. No time. I prefer to read scientific articles in print.

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

No special preference. I started with IBM Thnkpad. When it began to be released in China, I switched to the MacBook. In our community, two laptop models are popular - Thinkpad, or Macbook ... I switched to the MacBook also because I lost interest in picking with Linux. I have been installing and configuring Linux for a long time, got to version 11 of Slackware, then quit because it takes too much time.

Do you listen to music when you work?

When there is an opportunity. I'm from the time of progressive rock - Genesis, Van der Graaf Generator, Crimson and so on.

Doesn't interfere with work?

Not. I have two rooms: one at the company, the other at the university. When I stay at the university alone, I turn on the music to its full potential and can safely listen to music and work.

Which life hack allows you to be more effective?

I run long distances. This allows you to have a private time when you are alone and can. to think over something, to remember that I forgot what needs to be done, to collect my thoughts.

At first I felt that when you run, you get tired, blood flows from the brain, you begin to get dull. And in order to deal with this, I came up with solving problems when I was running. And then I realized that at this time you can systematize your affairs. I run for more than an hour, usually try to run 20 kilometers.

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

I am reading RSS Feedly. I don’t go to sites: I don’t have so much time. I made a list of what I want and periodically supplement it. Feedly allows me to keep abreast of everything that happens there is news and materials on the community, on IT in general, and so on.
I use Telegram. Of the messengers - only to them. It is more convenient than all.

What professional advice from the past could you give yourself?

In the past, we had the opportunity to think a lot of computers were low-power and tasks could take a whole week. And this time was free. You could relax, read an article, listen to music, do something else. And it contributed to science.

Now I am too focused on tasks - company tasks, family tasks, some personal tasks. I sometimes say to myself: "Learn to make sure that there is a time when you have no tasks." I think this is the most important. The brain must relax and then it better generates ideas.

What would you recommend to a person trying to go the same way?

I always tell my young colleagues that you should not be afraid to make mistakes. This is the youth's advantage: if he “snaps” once, no one will say that he is sniffed. Nothing fatal will happen.

No need to be afraid to take something and change dramatically. This can be done while there are no children, responsibility, mom-dad will insure. While this is, you can create. And perhaps this work will give a direction to the development of your whole life.