How IT professionals work. Daniel Pivovarov, Vscale

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 Daniel Pivovarov from Vscale . He regrets the lack of technical background, and also sees a way to increase efficiency in a correctly chosen frequency of rest.

What do you do in the company?

Lead the project vscale.io. I am engaged in development planning, I manage roadmap, product economics. I interact a lot with marketing and support.

One word (phrase) best describes how you work:

Better phrase: a lot and with a high.

How many hours a day do you spend on work?

On average, probably from 10 to 15.

How many hours do you sleep?

6-8 hours.

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

I used to live in an hour on the subway and about two hours by car, I mostly read (if on the subway).

Fortunately, I now live in a 20-minute drive from the office. This is very cool, although not already read.

What kind of manager do you personally use?

Google Keep.

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

JIRA, GitLab.

What is your working environment? Framework, other third-party products?

For me, Google Docs, draw.io are indispensable.
I constantly work in Confluence.

As IDE - products JetBrains: PyCharm, DataGrip. Well, Vim, of course. Without it, nowhere.

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

We have our own time series database at Selectel. As far as I know, it was created for internal tasks, now it is an open source project.

Also, once colleagues made a client for VNC, as an alternative to the popular NoVNC. It is used, for example, by the Open Source panel for managing servers - Ajenti.

In fact, there are quite a few internal libraries. If there is an understanding that we have done something that solves our problem and can be useful to the community, this will definitely fall into our github.

What annoys you most when you work?

Persuasion. I hate to persuade to work, although I sometimes have to do it myself.

What professional literature would you recommend?

Proceeding from my specifics of work, probably, this is Adizes: “The Ideal Leader”, “The Life Cycle of Corporations”.

Very, and not only in the work, helps the theory of Afanasyev about the psycheographer. It is revealed in the work titled "The Syntax of Love." She was recommended to me by my mentor at the dawn of the formation of my interest in management and, since then, this is my handbook.

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

Unfortunately, electronic readers. They are more convenient.

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

For a long time everything was on Linux and Android, but now I’ve completely switched to the Apple ecosystem, and I like it.

Do you listen to music when you work?

Yes many. Mainly in order to "white noise" and increase the concentration above the task.

The only situation in which it can disturb me is in the preparation of the documentation. We have to work a lot on the wording, and the music is a bit confusing.

Which life hack allows you to be more efficient?

I try to rest every quarter for 3-4 days, once a year - a week, once - 2. You need to be able to abstract and give yourself a break. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to observe such a regime, and this noticeably affects my emotional background and the possibilities of concentration. However, if you still manage to give yourself a rest, the efficiency for some time can exceed 100%.

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

Google inBox, Calendar.

What professional advice from the past could you give yourself?

Develop technique. Now it’s not enough for me to have a technical background that I managed to build up before I moved away from applied work with technologies.

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

Create tasks for yourself, solve them with pleasure. Look for this pleasure in what you do. Without him, becoming a really cool expert is impossible.