How IT professionals work. Maxim Lapshin, Founder of Flussonic

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.

Today our guest is Maxim Lapshin, the founder of Flussonic. He has a rather categorical view on how an IT businessman should be. But even more interesting is his attitude to the phrase "good software engineer."
')


What do you do in the company?

Now I am the technical director of the company. Still engaged in development, but less than before. In addition, it is necessary to deal with issues of development and promotion.

The company is small, so you have to deal with so many things. The more you manage to delegate, the better.

We are not an investment startup, we are a bootstrap company: we are developing with our own funds. Our team is not very structured yet.

How many hours a day do you spend on work?

My wife believes that 24 hours a day (laughs). Well, I think that hours 11-12.

How many hours do you sleep?

I try to have 8 hours of sleep.

Do you have breakfast

Yes, otherwise I’m getting angry and angry by dinner. Usually in the morning I take the child to the garden and immediately go to the cafe, eat porridge. Then - to the sport, if necessary.

Much time goes on the road to the office?

I live in Zelenograd, so it takes a little time - 10 minutes.

What do you do on the road when you have to make long trips?

If driving by car, she takes all the attention to herself. If I can, for example, go to Moscow not by car, but by train, then I just “sit” in a laptop.

What kind of todo-manager do you use personally?

I have a system specially developed by us that helps me not to forget about very important things - to write to a client or to perform other tasks important for the whole company.

Usually, when I come to work in the morning, I prescribe what I need to do today. Then I try to solve them consistently, gradually becoming distracted by what “pops up” in the process. If you can make two thirds of this list, that’s good. Then, looking back, I understand that some things have sprung off on their own. It is important to be able to let go of some things: I thought it would be necessary, and then it turns out that their importance was overestimated.

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

Use Gitlab. We do not use the issue tracker: this is inconvenient for us. Instead, we have the usual Redmine for programmers, as well as a wiki.

And communication with clients takes place through our samopinny “ticker”, which keeps everything, everything, for 4 years of work of our company.

What tools, frameworks do you use for development?

Sublime code editor, Git repository, IDE Erlang. We have nothing more. We tried to use Bitrix, but it didn’t happen: it goes against our workflows.

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

Yes, we automate much in our work, and this is not the code that we sell. In addition to the ticket holder, we have self-signed billing. There we keep records of all the money received from customers. It is written on the "rails".

I believe that every company should write such things independently. To look for ready-made solutions, to wait from someone else, that in my opinion, it makes no sense.

But we try not to produce extra things in order not to support them later.

What annoys you most when you work?

Irritating own ignorance of those things that allow you to achieve your goals. When the goal becomes clear, an image of what you want to build appears in your head, but it is not known what steps need to be taken to do this: a feeling of helplessness arises. And this feeling is annoying.

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

I myself have been working on Mac computers since 2007. Since 1999, I have only worked with Linux. Almost everyone, including the administrative staff, has Mac OS or Linux in our office. One person who does paperwork has Windows: she needs Microsoft Word. This sometimes causes problems.

Do you listen to music when you work?

I absolutely do not listen. Otherwise, I'm lost. It really interferes with the work. If someone in the office wants to listen to music, let him buy his closed headphones.

Which life hack allows you to be more efficient?

Something special, I will not say. The main thing is to constantly focus on what is important. When you build a company, there are a huge number of things that you just need to do. In fact, time is extremely short. Eight working hours are about nothing at all when you start doing more than one thing.

While I was just a programmer, it seemed like you could do a lot in one working day. Now I can make a list of 11 cases. This means that for each case I have 30 minutes, and I still have time to have lunch.

Therefore, something has to throw out, focus on the main thing. And for this it is important to understand what the company does, what values ​​it has, and how what you do is embedded in the values ​​of this company.

Another important task is to learn to delegate. Anyone will tell you that it is difficult: at first there is always a failure in the speed of work, but this is a common story.

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

First of all, this is the payment solution of Modbank. This is probably the best thing that has happened to the banking system over the past 50 years. If they were not there, then it would be easier to officially close at all and go to “sulfur”.

What would Maxim Lapshin write 10 years ago in a letter to the future to himself?

I would advise: if you want to achieve something big and important, then the most important thing for a programmer is to focus not on what you can do, but on what people need. After all, in the end, money income comes down to the fact that people do not buy what they do not need.

Therefore, we must think about other people, think about what value you bring to them. When you sit and work as an ordinary programmer, it is quite difficult to understand. This may be clear in words, but in fact - not everything is so simple.

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?

I am not ready to give advice on how to build your business. You have to go through it yourself. But I can give advice to anyone who wants to connect themselves with computers, programming, and all the rest.

A good engineer is one who does not care what to write on. The engineer who says he writes only, for example, in Java is not a first-class specialist. I have people in the team to whom I give everything I want - from exotic Julia to repairing iOS code.

All such specializations are a matter of momentary knowledge. After six months they disappear, and a deeper, common understanding remains.

This is even more important for those who want to connect life not only with programming, but with the near-programmer business. When I was still working at Evil Martians, we collaborated with Darberry, and Oleg Kozyrev, the company director, spoke with us. Despite the fact that it was a manager, he brought us code several times, which he wrote, launched, tested, and in the end it all worked for him. He did not shy away from such work. Although this man is still a businessman. He's doing Rocket Bank now, by the way.

Therefore, in my opinion, to be a businessman in the field of IT, it is better to be able to program.