How IT professionals work. Andrei Yankovsky, JSRs CSSSR

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 Andrei Yankovsky from CSSSR . Among our interlocutors, he is distinguished by the fact that he does not work as much as the majority, although he occupies a serious position. About how Andrew explains this phenomenon, read under the cut.





What do you do in the company?

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I’m one of the top JavaScript developers and timlid of the Vostok working group in the CSSSR. My team of 5 people is engaged in projects for a major online real estate service. Personally, I am engaged in writing code, code review, developing infrastructure for developing and scheduling tasks.



One word that best describes how you work:



"Team".



I value the team most of all in my work, I give maximum attention to its development, I follow the mood of the guys and I try to help them with their initiatives. I regard any mistakes as my own.



How many hours a day do you spend on work?



I usually work productively 6 hours a day, but I am in touch and monitor the situation at about 12 (from 11:00 to 23:00). The last couple of weeks have to work actively around 8-9 hours, helping on another project.



How many hours do you sleep?



I sleep for 7 hours, but I do not comply with the regime. I know for sure that I work much more productively if I wake up early. Unfortunately, there is not enough discipline to secure such a regime.



How do you have breakfast?



We'll see how it goes. If you manage to grab a sandwich or a banana, I consider breakfast a success.



What are you doing on the way to / from work?



We work remotely, so to start a working day, I just need to open a laptop, which is always at hand.



What kind of todo-manager do you use personally?



On the Mac there are the most primitive stickers that can be glued to the desktop. I use only them: it says on them how much money I spent yesterday, what my tasks are for today, who I need to call. Everything is there. From the outside it seems like chaos, but I can find everything there instantly.



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



We have them differ in projects, but mostly it is Jira and Trello. Repository - git in different variations: BitBucket, Gitlab, Github.



Of all the abundance of tools, I like Trello the most. Jira is big, complex and slow. In it, even the task to create is very long and dreary. Redmine is the same, only worse. This interface from the 90s is just awful. Where Redmine is used at the client, we have rebuilt the processes: we take the task from the customer, we give it the status “in work”. We transfer it to Trello, move it between the columns and at the end transfer it to the customer. After that, in Redmine we change the status to “done”.



What other working environment (tools and software) do you use at work?



I have a Macbook Pro 2016 Retina, Jetbrains WebStorm, Chrome and Slack.



Does the company have internal projects?



We have several internal projects. Two of them exist to automate processes within the company, and two more are preparing for free navigation as separate startups. But I rarely participate in them.



What annoys you most when you work?



When my work and efforts are not respected. A large number of phoning very exhausting. I do not like to fill out documents and track work time in the client tempo.



What professional literature would you recommend?



About four years ago I was very fond of programming books, but now I think that there are a lot of faster and more convenient ways to get knowledge. If you still talk about books that I would advise you to read, then this is:

• “Compilers: Principles, Technologies and Tools” by Alfred Aho, Ravi Seti and Jeffrey D. Ulman (better known as the “Book of the Dragon”);
• “The Art of Programming” by Donald Knut.

This is not a must read's, but they allow you to really pump. After reading them, or even acquaintance with them, you begin to understand how everything actually works.



There are books on individual technologies, on the same JavaScript, but they are not needed at all. This is usually the standard documentation of the language written in your own words. Particularly "sin" with such books many pages O'Reilly. At the beginning of their career, programmers come across these books, but they don’t read them a second time.



Separately, I would single out “acidic” books. For example, landoflisp.com .



This one is dedicated to Lisp, a rare programming language invented back in the 60s. This is a functional language, and its study provides an understanding of fundamentally different approaches to solving problems. Such books are simply interesting to read, and it is immediately apparent from them that they were written by a person, not a robot.



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



I can not read electronic readers - I get tired quickly and lose focus. Therefore, I prefer to read only books printed on paper in the old fashioned way.



What technique and why do you prefer at work and at home?



It does not matter to me on what to work: all my life I sat on Windows and was happy. Then I switched to Mac, and I am also happy. In this sense, I do not care. But I like smartphones on Windows Phone, because they are multi-colored. I'm green, by the way.



What do you listen when you work?



I rely on “recommended audio” VKontakte. My own playlist is a hodgepodge of everything. I love slow electronics and techno on old synthesizers.



Which life hack allows you to be more efficient?



Get up earlier! But it is not always possible to use it. I tried to live a couple of weeks with friends who started a dog. She has to walk every morning, and take time off will not work. This is a good way to tighten up the daily regimen, maybe I'll get my own one soon.



What applications and services can't you do without?



I always open a bunch of tabs in the browser and I can’t just take them and close them (all of a sudden there’s something important among them). Therefore, smart people have created a plugin for the Session Buddy browser, which allows you to save tabs and windows. All of them are saved and you can return to them (to the entire hundred of open tabs). I do not have much with the returns, but I am sure that I will not lose anything.



I also like Reddit and VKontakte from services. On the smartphone, I use maps, standard notes and Uber. In short, nothing interesting.



What professional advice from the past could you give yourself?



I lost time when I tried to understand programming, not understanding the basic differences, for example, between the web and the desktop. Because of this, when the task appeared to make a small desktop utility for formatting files, I did it in Ruby. Under Windows. I don’t know how Ruby works on Windows now, but 5 years ago it was a nightmare. Also, the GUI was written using a very strange library, where all elements could be positioned only in Ruby code. In the end, I wrote something terrible, just not knowing what to do differently.



I believe that it is very important for a beginner to get a brief insight into what is going on in the programming world and how things work before starting a training. Tell, for example, what is the difference between Java and JavaScript.



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



As already said, I would advise such a person to get a start at the start of an excursion into different programming languages ​​and approaches in order not to step on my rake.