“My achievement was that I generally returned to the profession” - 10 questions for a programmer, issue 10

The men in our releases have already been decently full of men, and they seem to have touched upon all the problems from all sides. Some responded to the fact that the next 10 questions they could ask already in the FSB (it would be, comrades prohibitors).

But it was also interesting for me to hear about things you guys hardly thought about. How, for example, to return to the profession after the decree. Or how to continue to learn technology, if half a day you have to carry a child in kindergartens.

Therefore, when I recently spoke with Alina Anufrieva ( allinne ) about IP in Germany , I asked her 10 questions that were already familiar to us.

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

It seems to me that my greatest achievement was that I returned to the profession altogether. And twice - after the decree and after the move. The frontend has greatly accelerated over the past seven years. Every day some new libraries and frameworks appear, something is constantly changing. There was a feeling that I was not returning, but starting from scratch.

I am proud of the project in which I took part before moving to Berlin. It was the integration of text recognition in the picture and its translation from English into Russian directly into search results in the Yandex mobile application. Such projects are always close communication with adjacent teams and coordination of the process. And the frontend is the very point where technology converges and the result is shown to the user. That's why I love my profession: to show the result of the work of a huge team.

2. And now - about the most cruel fakap

Once we made a website for a publishing company, and they bartered us to advertise in books. I needed to create an advertising reversal, and everything would be fine - the party was printed out, launched. I looked and this: "oh, shit." It turned out that it was wrong with the address of our site.

I then had a salary of about two hundred dollars. I had to give it all in compensation.

Another fakap happened when I went to work after the decree. Before the holidays we worked in svn and in places cvs. After the decree I had to learn the git commands. It was necessary to sverzhit branch. I didn’t understand and did git push --force in dev.

But nothing terrible was lost, everyone laughed. They said it was a baptism of fire. All pass through it.

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

I'm working at home now, I have my favorite sofa and a MacBook Pro with a touchbar. I write code in Visual Studio Code. He is like Ember - he set and work, no add-ons are needed, he is good in itself.

I switched to Bear tracker. It is free, lightweight and minimalistic. For communication - Slack, it has both pros and cons, but there is no alternative.

I tried to write for myself analogue Yandeks.video. We have a home server and wanted to watch all our videos on a web page.

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

The frontend is love at first sight. In Baumanka, we were on lectures on HTML / CSS for the 2nd year, and I really liked the idea of ​​hypertext markup. I found a teacher in the department who needed junior developers to type out sites for Moscow art galleries. So I got into the profession. Then we were not called programmers, just layout designers, such non-programmers who impose buttons and drop-down menus.

But I was lucky all my life. I came across good people and worked with them. The most important thing for me is who I will directly interact with - the team leader, the designer. In Yandex, there was a tacit motto that people are the most important thing.

If friends call me to work not for money, I will go. From this I started. But for sure I would not go into the banking and monetary sphere in general. Therefore, I once refused to direct. I just do not like this area.

But in government structures it would be interesting to work, to look at all this with different eyes, from the inside. It was always curious how the system works.

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

We are currently using Ember.js, but before that I worked with i-bem.js. The framework turned out to be good, and it is a pity that it is not as popular as everyone else. The popularity of technology matters a lot to marketing and community. There used to be jQuery, MooTools, Prototype libraries - and there was a lot of competition between them. When someone takes the lead, the community begins to grow exponentially, while others lag behind.

But after 15 years in the frontend, I learned Zen, and I generally like everything. What is happening right now is right. I do not possess such high competence to interfere in this process. JavaScript evolves into a more functional language, more powerful tools appear. It's good.

There is one big pain in javascript - dynamic typing. You need to get used to it and always remember this feature.

Another front-end pain is the implementation of standards by browsers. Now caniuse.com and stackoverflow help us, and before there was only window.alert and articles on quirksmode.org.

In general, I would like the threshold for entering my profession to be significantly reduced. Now, to become a front-end, you need to learn a million technologies and tools, compare them and understand what suits you. I know a few people who left the frontend, simply because they could not stand this race.

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

Learn better by doing real projects. I went to the conference a lot when I worked at Yandex, but now I’m disappointed in them. Now these are mainly marketing events. They do not talk about technology specifically, they just say: "use these technologies, and everything will be super." Do not talk about the pros and cons, about solutions to problems.

If not in practice, then you can get experience communicating with the community. There are many ways: communities in Slack, chat in Telegram, blogs, documentation, podcasts, and more. You ask yourself, you answer to others - all this is an experience.

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

I would not fly to Mars. Well, I'll fly well, and then what? There is a saying: "You can not wipe it without getting dirty, but you can wipe the soil without wiping it." The same thing here - why did we decide to colonize Mars, why did it even come up with an idea? Because it became crowded on Earth, environmental conditions deteriorate. But you need to think about how to solve the reason, and not to look for workarounds.

I would organize something high-tech. Recently, I have a lot of relatives and friends faced with cancer. I would be looking for how to get rid of him. Most likely, it would be some kind of bio-engineering, gene medicine. I want to use technology, coupled with medicine and benefit.

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

I try to communicate more with people. It is very lonely when working alone, without going to the office. I go to master classes in drawing, I walk with my child.

When I moved to Berlin, I thought the Russians were separate from each other. And in fact, there is a very warm community. Everyone with whom I met here, accepted me well, understood my difficulties, helped with language, translations, and problem solving.

I did not understand German at all. There was a time when I did not want to go out in order not to fall into a situation with incomprehension. For me it was a shock that decimal numbers say the opposite - first one, then ten, not “twenty four”, but “four twenty”. And now I do not care. If I don't understand, I'm talking about it. The Germans are a friendly nation. They try to help, speak English or switch to a simpler German.

Once a year I fly home. My parents live in Moscow, and my father-in-law lives in Novosibirsk.
Therefore, a week for each city. Of course, I miss them.

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

There is no favorite study book, now everything is online. My most visited site is MDN - reference. I also have a flexbox guide on my bookmarks (https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/).

From popular science, I love medical literature, the one for ordinary readers. The last reading is called “Do No Harm.” She wrote the British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh.

I even went to Moscow at the international exhibition at Crocus Expo, where they showed the remains of real people - muscles, bones, and clearly analyzed the human anatomy.

Maybe in the next life - if I had one, I would think about the medical profession. There is a completely different level of responsibility. Just in the book “Do no harm” it is written that micromovements of the surgeon’s scalpel change human life.

The last art book that I read and which I really, really liked - Stephen King's Dark Tower. I read the whole cycle for about a month. I have a addiction to reading addiction - if I come across something interesting, I can not sleep.

I also liked The curious story of the dog in the night. She's talking about a boy with autism, how he sees the world with his own eyes. Although the book is written by an adult without autism. My friend in Berlin is dealing with such children. Everything she says is the same as what was written. And very interesting to read. You begin to better understand children and people in general.

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

What are you thinking about?

Question from previous hero

What advice would you give yourself back 10 years ago?

Learn English and buy bitcoins!

Question to the next hero

What decision has changed your whole life?