How IT professionals work. Oleg Bartunov, Postgres Professional

We continue to ask specialists about the mode of work and rest, professional habits, the tools they use, and much more.

It will be interesting to find out what unites them, in what they contradict each other. Perhaps their answers will help to identify some general patterns, useful tips that will help many of us.
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Today our guest is Oleg Bartunov, CEO of Postgres Professional. In 2015, Oleg and his team attracted several million dollars to create a domestic vendor, PostgreSQL.

What do you do in the company?

First, I do strategy, form an idea of ​​what should 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 the development of a roadmap.

I also deal with promotion issues. In general, the whole complex of tasks for which I have enough time. Much time is spent on promotion. I have spoken at conferences a lot before, and now even more: we need to promote our products, communicate with people. I speak at Russian and international conferences. After all, we are not just a company, we are members of the international community PostgreSQL. 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 so many companies in Russia that have 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 education, we want to create a branch of sub-structure in Russia, which is now practically absent.
How many hours a day do you spend on work?

Probably 15 hours.

How many hours do you sleep?

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

Do you have 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 bit, then I take her to kindergarten, sometimes I run in our park and go to work

What are you doing on the way to / from work? A lot of time goes on the road?

Sometimes I read mail, news, and so on, and sometimes I have the opportunity to just relax. The road takes 20-30 minutes. Sometimes, I take a taxi when I need to relax and think about something. At home, this will not be possible: you need to deal with children.

What kind of todo-manager do you use personally?

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

What kind of task manager do you use / issue tracker / repository?

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

What is your working environment? Framework, 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, where both our employees and external invited speakers speak.

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

Yes. People come give reports. Other people write, we send them feedback. We hold and exit seminars. 12 times this year, read three-day courses on cities. After all, there is no such industry - a DBMS structure, so you have to create it yourself.

What annoys you most when you work?

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

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

What 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 to work, there was nothing and we had to learn everything from scratch. I can recommend the Stanford course on database technology. Unfortunately, there is no Russian one, but we are working on it and are going to release it under a free license so that our universities can use it, take part in its development

What do you prefer: electronic reading rooms or paper books?

And that, and that. I read the artistic literature completely on the phone. No time. Scientific articles I prefer to read in print.

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

No special preference. I started with IBM Thnkpad. When it was released in China, I switched to a MacBook. Two laptops are popular in our community - Thinkpad, or Macbook ... I switched to the MacBook also because I lost interest in picking with Linux. I spent a long time installing and configuring Linux, reached version 11 of Slackware, and 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.

Does it interfere with your work?

Not. I have two classrooms: one in the company, the other in the university. When I stay at the university alone, I turn on the music at full power and I can quietly listen to music and work.

Which life hack allows you to be more efficient?

I run long distances. This allows you to have a private time when you are alone and you can. think through something, remember that you forgot that you need to have time to do it, collect your thoughts.

At first, I felt that when you run, you get tired, the blood flows from the brain, you start to get blunt. And in order to deal with this, I came up with the solution of puzzles when you run. And then I realized that at this time I could systematize my affairs. I run for more than an hour, usually I try to cover 20 kilometers.

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

I read RSS feedly. I do not go on sites: I do not have so much time. I have compiled a list of what I want and periodically supplement it. Feedly allows me to be aware of everything that is happening there in the community news and materials, on IT in general, and so on.
I use Telegram. From instant messengers - only to them. He is the most comfortable.

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-powered and tasks could require a whole week. And this time was free. You could relax, read the article, listen to music, do something else. And it contributed to science.

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

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

I always tell young colleagues that you should not be afraid of making mistakes. This is an advantage for young people: if it “fades out” once, no one will say that it has been spilled. Nothing deadly will happen.

Do not be afraid to take something abruptly change. This can be done, as long as there are no children, responsibility, mom-dad will hedge. As long as you have it you can create. And perhaps this creativity will give the direction of development of your whole life.