How IT professionals work. Igor Myzgin, Servers.ru

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 Igor Myzgin, specialist in interaction with key partners and customers of Servers.ru. He does not work in the office, he has an irregular schedule. Igor is the first holder of the “MCSE: Security 2003” certificate in Russia.

What do you do in the company?

Clients who need a complete list of hosting services, I try to give the opportunity to take advantage of our entire ecosystem.

We offer our customers hosting around the world. This is America, Europe, Asia, Russia. We are constantly evolving. Soon we will have South America. We rent physical and virtual servers, we provide services based on our own CDN provider, we provide IP transit services to those who need really a lot of traffic. We also provide kolocations in the form of racks. We are ready to offer all this all over the world, in any quantities.

My task is to understand the needs of the client, to understand how to optimize his expenses, to identify the range of tasks that our service should solve. I need to develop such a project together with the client so that everything works for the client so that it fits into the existing or planned budget.

After that, I perform the function of a “lawyer” of the client within the holding. I am trying to understand the client's business model, and on the basis of this, find out how the client sees us and why we can be needed by him, how we can be useful.

One phrase (phrase) best describes how you work:

Catch the wave.

How many hours a day do you spend on work?

Complex issue. I do not have an office, where I come at 9 am, turn on the laptop, and at 18:00, respectively, turn it off. I can, relatively speaking, work on the night from Saturday to Sunday, and I can go somewhere on my business on Wednesday afternoon.

How many hours do you sleep?

It depends. Yesterday I slept 4 hours, today - 7.

Do you have breakfast

Not always. Usually, my breakfast is only instant coffee without sugar and without milk.

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

If I'm driving, I talk on the phone. If I go by public transport, then I do something in a laptop.

What kind of todo-manager do you use personally?

Notebook A4 on a metal sheath for 200-400 sheets, weighing per kilogram and a pen. As experience shows, this is the best option for individual use. She is also non-volatile (laughs).

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

Since my position is communication and management, I do not use these products. I know that we have JIRA, RT and Confluence.

Since we are guys from the 90s, we have lived on a corporate Jabber server for a long time. We recently had a miracle, and we made a step from the twentieth century to the twenty-first: we had an internal HipChat server. Now we can send each other Emoji or attach. Now we have room chats. This is very cool and allows you to hold a discussion of projects by a team in which people are scattered in 3-4 countries (laughs).

What tools, frameworks do you use for development?

About the frameworks - yes they are, but the developers ... And I am the manager.

We are a “small” company: we exist in 10 countries. We conduct local relations in almost 10 currencies, we have a certain number of legal entities in different jurisdictions.

For management and financial accounting, we use SAP R3. But in SAP we mostly have a financial director, a group of accountants, and thank God, I don’t live in SAP.

Our company has an internal development, CRM-system. It includes the inventory manager, ERP, which manages hosting as a business. This is a self-written combine that automates the hosting business, which is conducted on several continents, with different counterparties. It also integrates the management of several of our products.

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

We constantly accumulate experience with our clients, and often this experience is structured as a separate project and product. So it used to be with cloud storage. This year, the infrastructure project Prisma.AI has become such a project for us. From the first days the application works and develops at our facilities around the world. And we, along with the Prism team, learned to grow exponentially this year, doubling and tripling the number of servers every week or two. We managed to find a solution that allows us to add power very quickly, remaining at that time ten times more productive and at times cheaper than, say, AWS. As a result, based on the infrastructure that our team developed then specifically for Prisma AI, the idea was born to create a new product - Prisma Cloud.

Now all our clients can get physical or virtual servers with graphic coprocessors and effectively build applications that work with machine learning / neural networks.

So for you, internal projects are not something special?

This is an ongoing process: new technologies are emerging, we are constantly creating and implementing something. Docker appeared a few years ago. We began to look and understand how to integrate it with our developments for those customers who would like to use it. It was also an internal project, which then became a standard grocery option.

Or, for example, colleagues traveled to the next OpenStack summit. As a result, we have another project to analyze the feasibility of module migrations to current generations, and this will eventually turn into something at the product level.

We also have purely internal projects, such as the migration of SAP R3 to S4 / HANA. That is, we have a lot of internal projects, and they often become new client services.

What annoys you most when you work?

First, you start to rage about the fact that all people think differently. Then you realize that this should be taken as an axiom, and it ceases to enrage. I learned to put up with such things.

There are, of course, some nuances: we have a distributed company, so everyone is in different time zones. If you need to call in Dallas, and there at 4 am at this time, then it is pointless to call there. Also, you do not always know where this or that employee is now and what is his local time. A person can be in Singapore and there is +5 hours, maybe in Dallas and there -8 from Moscow, and maybe in Cyprus, and there -1. But to rave about this, too, is meaningless. It's just such a feature when business is done around the whole “ball.”

What professional literature would you recommend?

Just share an interesting observation: if a person is less than 30 years old, he usually did not read the three-volume book of Knut. Although the book is still relevant and can not really become outdated - the algorithms do not become obsolete. Now, maybe, it is not relevant to write in Assembler, but it’s still worth knowing about assemblers, about low-level operation of hardware. So, there is no universal literature, but there is a certain fundamental set of books about basic things, which is different for each field. DBA is worth reading by Kodd, Knuth's programmers, and system administrators can read the RFC. About 15 years ago, one intelligent man told me: "Read the RFC, everything is written there." And this advice for 15 years is not outdated.

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

Tired of the poor quality of electronic readers. A long time ago I was reading paper books. Then, 15 years ago, I had a Palm 3E (16 shades of gray, 2 MB of memory). Gradually, I still realized that I needed to read paper books, because in our country there are no readers that do not kill the normal formatting of the text.

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

Mac computer, Windows virtual machine, iOS and Android smartphones, iOS tablet.

The corporate standard of our company is Apple. In general, we have about 270 employees in 10 countries, but those who use Microsoft products in their daily work will have a dozen. But to see Linux on an Apple laptop is more than a typical story from our developers.

Do you listen to music when you work?

Yes of course. This allows you to distract from what is happening around. Therefore, I put on headphones, turn on soft music that I know and love. Then I plunge into it and work calmly.

Which life hack allows you to be more efficient?

The most standard method is to come up with a task in the morning that you need to do, do it, and then everything else.

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

Facebook In general, you can do without everything, but the degree of comfort is reduced.

What would Igor Myzgin write 10 years ago in a letter to the future to himself?

There is a problem: I'm 35. I sell, not plunging into technology platforms. 10 years ago, I was the systems architect for the Microsoft technology stack. I am the first holder of the “MCSE: Security 2003” certificate in Russia, because I was simply the first to pass one of the Prometric exams. I first uploaded this exam to Russian servers to pass it (laughs). Therefore, I do not know what advice that person can give 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 parents say that now you need to be a PHP developer or accountant, this is all opportunistic. Instead, you just need to find what drives you and try to do it. You can be anyone and earn a living. If this process drives you, you need to develop in this direction. Money after all pay for professionalism.

If this occupation drives you, you will become a pro in any industry. And if you work because it is prestigious or your parents said that you will be the chief accountant, and you are sick of it, you will not reach a high level, and as a result you will not be paid serious money for it. The axiomatics here is simple.