How IT professionals work. Ilya Kosmodemyansky, PostgreSQL-Consulting LLC

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 Ilya Kosmodemyansky, CEO of PostgreSQL-Consulting LLC. Ilya has an extremely simple lafkhak for all occasions. And he considers V. I. Lenin to be one of his authorities.

What do you do in the company?

I do all sorts of things. Our company is small. We have never positioned ourselves as a company that exclusively deals with making money.

We are engaged in supporting client databases, we have been working with PostgreSQL for a long time. Therefore, our task is to provide our clients with good support, and my task is to coordinate all this so that both the clients and us as a result are well.

It is clear that we have a lot of technical experts. But I myself, as a person with a background in the development of databases, often do the work "in the field."

In addition, I am responsible for promoting Postgres technologies, I go to conferences, tell people how to work with them, and I spend the training.

Still, my main task is to organize support. This is a separate, hard work. It is necessary to make the client come, and his request is not lost. After all, every client thinks that he is more important than others, and rightly so.

We have a distributed team. Our engineers work all over the world.

One phrase (phrase) best describes how you work:

Work so that the work remains loved.

I think the only way to do it well is to love her.

How many hours a day do you spend on work?

Difficult to answer. Our working day is not normal. We only need an office for business, lawyers and accountants. Engineers work from home.

Therefore, in sum, it will be close to a full day. I believe that you need to work in a fairly tight schedule. I try to start work in the morning, at 7 o'clock, and continue until the evening. Trying not to work at the weekend.

If rush jobs arise and you have to work more, then you can immediately see how efficiency drops.

But since this is still “his own business,” I sometimes find myself thinking about work, for example, when I just ride a bicycle.

How many hours do you sleep?

I try to sleep at least 8 hours.

You live in Moscow?

I live in Germany. But I have an average of about 200 thousand miles of summer a year.

What do you do on the road?

Sometimes I need to do some work while I go somewhere. Now, unfortunately, Wi-fi began to appear on airplanes - it became a little worse (laughs).

But if I know that I will fly during working hours, then I try to use it for its intended purpose.

But it happens that I have several conferences in a row in different countries of the world. In this case, I, on the contrary, try to somehow “dump” all of this: for example, reading a fiction book between conferences - to have a rest. This is a very hard work.

What kind of todo manager do you use?

We have several products in our company. One of them is a proprietary development called Timer. It is designed to record the time and as quickly as possible distribution of tasks. It often happens that tasks come in large numbers and urgently need to do something with them. If we run the standard for many IT companies procedure for managing tasks through JIRA, during this time, the world will collapse, and something will happen.

I also use Google Calendar. And recently I discovered a more convenient calendar - Fantastical. And for more important tasks, a white board hangs in my house, divided into three parts - “today”, “tomorrow” and “someday”.

What issue tracker'om / repository do you use?

Timer is also our issue tracker. For some time we used Redmine, but for our tasks we need something more specific. Most of these trackers are designed either for development or for highly bureaucratic exploitation.

For public things, we use GitHub, and for non-public our own Git repository.

What tools, frameworks do you use for development?

We actively use vim: we often solve low-level tasks. Intensively used Git - as a concept. We often use Linux utilities such as Perf.

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

We write a lot of pure working software. This is mainly admin things. We work with open source, and this often requires some sort of “strapping”. They grow into whole projects that we support or share in open source.

What annoys you most when you work?

I, like all techies, do not like to touch papers. But I understand that this is necessary in order to do what you are interested in.

What professional literature would you recommend?

I work with databases. Therefore, I can recommend several books on this topic.

Transactional Information Systems. Gerhard Weikum and Gottfried Vossen ISBN: 978-1-55860-508-4 - this is a fundamental tutorial on data processing algorithms - about working with transactions, with recovery, with competitive access. The best book in this area.

Another book about the device database - Architecture of a Database System. Joseph M. Hellerstein, Michael Stonebraker and James Hamilton. This is such an educational program. Any person working in IT would be helpful to read it. In it, little is written about relational algebra, but there is a lot about exactly how the databases are organized algorithmically.

These two books are strongly recommended.

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

I prefer paper books, but I read mostly electronic books. This is pretty trivial: if I want to see a good art book on my shelf, I will buy it in paper form. But if we are talking about professional literature, I use e-books.

There are a lot of new books in the databases. And if I buy them in paper form, I will very soon live among books that will very quickly become obsolete.

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

For historical reasons, I have been using Mac OS for a long time - since the ninth version. In general, I am satisfied. I do not see much point in switching to Windows or Linux, but ideologically I am not tied to this.

Sometimes the idea is to put on a Linux laptop and use it somehow. But the lack of some things stops me, although, you can believe me, I could easily install and use Linux (laughs). For the desktop, this is not the most suitable system.

Perhaps, in some ways, I’m not quite happy with Mac OS, but I use it as a usual and convenient “stack” for me.

My main phone is on iOS. I recently picked up an Android phone for the experiment and immediately made sure that Apple was right. Perhaps, on Android there are some more interesting features than on iOS, but it has big problems with the integration of these features. The problem is about the same as Linux on the desktop.

Which life hack allows you to be more efficient?

Reception is the simplest: if you really do not want to do something, you have to sit down and do it. As one of my friends said: “When I needed to write some unpleasant paper, I bought myself a bottle of brandy, sausages, and slowly did this job” (laughs).

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

Yes, there is one more thing, without which I cannot imagine my life. Despite having good popular email clients, I use mutt. This is especially important for work mail, as its volume is much higher than personal.

What would Ilya Kosmodemyansky write 10 years ago in a letter to the future to himself?

I would probably advise myself to study more deeply and systematically many fundamental things in IT (I taught biology in general). Maybe it would be useful to me. It was more difficult for me to master much due to the fact that there was no base. But then, studying everything on my own, I could choose really good import textbooks. And it is worth a lot.

Although, on the other hand, I would not like to repeat some things. If I had been studying more UNIX and databases, I would now be a system programmer in some company. But much more I like what I am now.

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?

Vladimir Ilyich has already said everything: “Learn, learn and study again.” No need to stop, you need to constantly look at some new things, even if they seem to you utter nonsense. This process stimulates brain activity well.

But you shouldn't get too carried away too. There are people who pursue only to make something supernova.

People who go to IT, in my opinion, have to remember one simple thing: in programming, and in the industry as a whole, there is very little hi-tech and a lot of routine, like drawing new molds. Now the topic of IT is a bit overheated, so people need to be prepared for what they really have to do. And you need to love it very much.