DEV Community: Maria Yanchauskayte

Developer Career Path: To Become a Team Lead or Stay a Developer?

Maria Yanchauskayte — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 07:42:22 +0000

For a developer, becoming a team leader can be a trap or open up opportunities for creating software. Two years ago, when I was a developer, I was thinking, “I want to be a team leader. It’s so cool, he’s in charge of everything and gets more money. It’s the next step after a senior.” Back then, no one could tell me how wrong I was. I had to find it out myself.

I Got to Be a Team Leader — Twice

I’m naturally very organized. Whatever I do, I try to put things in order, create systems and processes. So I’ve always been inclined to take on more responsibilities than just coding. My first startup job, let’s call it T, was complete chaos in terms of development processes.

Now I probably wouldn’t work in a place like that, but at the time, I enjoyed the vibe. Just imagine it — numerous clients and a team leader who set tasks to the developers in person (and often privately). We would often miss deadlines and had to work late. Once, my boss called and asked me to come back to work at 8 p.m. to finish one feature — all because the deadline was “the next morning.” But at T, we were a family.

We also did everything ourselves — or at least tried to. I’ll never forget how I had to install Ubuntu on a rack server that we got from one of our investors. When I would turn it on, it sounded like a helicopter taking off!

At T, I became a CTO and managed a team of 10 people. So it was my first experience as a team leader.

Then I came to work at D — as a developer. And it was so different in every way when it came to processes.

They employed classic Scrum with sprints, burndown charts, demos, story points, planning, and backlog grooming. I was amazed by the quality of processes, but at first, I was just coding and minding my own business. Then I became friends with the Scrum master. I would ask him lots of questions, and he would willingly answer them and recommend good books.

My favorite was Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg. The process at D was based on its methods. As a result, both managers and sellers knew when to expect the result.

Then I joined Skyeng, also as a developer. Unlike my other jobs, it excels at continuous integration with features shipped every day. Within my team, we used a Kanban-like method.

We were also lucky to have our team leader, Petya. At our F2F meetings, we could discuss anything, from missing deadlines to setting up a task tracker. Sometimes I would just give feedback or he would give me advice.

That’s how Petya got to know I’d had some management experience at T and learned Scrum at D.

So one day, he offered me to host a stand-up.

A week later, I found out that Skyeng was starting a new product, and Petya with some people from our team would work on it. Those who stayed needed a new team leader.

Everything happened by itself — as if I was drawn to the role of a team leader by some sort of gravity.

When a company is looking for a team leader, they often pick someone who is

well-organized
ready to engage with the team’s processes
motivated
respected by the colleagues

People like that make good managers, so they are usually the first candidates for an open vacancy. It worked this way for me and a couple of my colleagues from other companies. It’s funny that everyone pointed out that they made almost no effort to become team leaders.

But being appointed as a team leader is one thing, actually being a team leader is another.

What Changed and How I Dealt With It

The first few days are sheer joy and euphoria. You’re leading a team, you’re in charge, you have so many opportunities and so much responsibility! It was several years after I’d left T, I had more experience, worked on my mistakes, and got to know some advanced processes and methods. So I felt pretty confident about this second attempt at leadership.

But soon the euphoria wore off, leaving me face to face with the routine. I felt some changes.

I couldn't find Zen in my daily work any longer — so I had to focus on the bigger picture. As a team leader, you cannot see the result of your work immediately. It’s both a good thing and a bad thing.

As a developer, you have a build compiled, a task done, or a new feature shipped every day. That brings some sort of enjoyment — I’ve done my job, now I can have a rest.

As a team leader, you don’t get to present the result of your work very often: most of your days are like “planning — Zoom calls — emails — adding tasks to the backlog.” These small steps then create something big like a new app feature. You might not have written a single line of code in months, but as a team, you created something huge.

My team realized the Explore Topics section for the Skyeng app on iOS and Android with a level map for exercises, an energy scale for different types of students, daily goals, a progress tracker, various exercise mechanics, voicing, etc.

It’s all about delegating — you have to quit doing everything yourself. To become a team leader, you have to learn how to code through your developers.

An inexperienced team leader can easily become the bottleneck of a team. Developers do their best job when they’re not distracted, so they have a prioritized backlog, one stand-up, and a couple of calls per week. But when a new feature has to be added to the backlog, or there’s a critical bug, or a server is down, everyone comes to the team leader. His job is to connect people and make sure everything goes smoothly.

There’s a certain risk of becoming a call center operator — and it’s a sure way to burnout in a couple of months.

Here I’d like to say a thank you to my PM. He noticed my problem and recommended some team leader chats and channels, conference talks, etc.

I learned some practices to maintain focus. I informed people I would now check my emails 1–2 times a day, arrange meeting-free days, plan my day on paper (I tried to scale up this practice to the whole team, but developers aren’t big fans of such things). I changed my priorities only in the most critical cases. That way, I did everything on my to-do list.

I had to break my old habits and adopt new ones.

You cannot learn the team leader skills while you’re a developer. As a team leader, you’re a messenger between the business and the development team. Any company aims to make a profit so your clients always want many high-quality features in little time. Developers want to deliver high-quality features but with no rush. Your role as a team leader is to find a perfect balance between quality, speed, and quantity.

In order to do that, you have to build a trust-based relationship with your clients so that they understand what the team is doing, how long it will take, and how to help them meet the deadline. You need to work on your soft skills while also staying firm about your principles. All this along with setting up processes, formats, and the pipeline: how you get tasks, work on them, fix them, and ship them.

All these skills can be acquired. But you have to be ready that it’ll change your personality.

Not a Team Leader Anymore? How to Find Yourself Again

Two years ago, I thought that becoming a team leader would be a natural step in my career as a developer. Now I believe it’s more like a step in another direction. The outcome of such a step depends on the person — you’ll never know until you try.

You have to look at yourself in this role. Not for a couple of months, but for a half a year at least, better for a couple of years. There’s a good chance it’ll be hard and you’ll want to go back before getting any results. My advice is to set a deadline and say, “I’m not going to draw any conclusions before this deadline. I’ll give it a try and then decide whether I like it or not.” That's what I did.

I was a team lead for a year and a half (from September 2018 to February 2020). But I decided to resign and go back to development.

We all work remotely and communicate mostly through Slack — so every step is recorded. It all worked out as I said, and the person I recommended is now the team leader and I enjoy my daily Zen in another team.

by Oleg Sklyarov, Fullstack Developer at Skyeng company

What to Do When You’re a Food Engineer by Training—but a Pilot by Vocation

Maria Yanchauskayte — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 08:37:38 +0000

by Ivan Lissitzky, backend developer at Skyeng company

Hi, my name is Ivan and I am a backend developer at Skyeng. I’m not gonna tell you it was my childhood dream to become a programmer. I suppose, like many Soviet boys in the early 80’s, I wanted to become a pilot.

I first fell in love with planes around the age of four, when I flew with my parents to see my grandmother for the first time. Later, I would devour aviation-related books and magazines in my school library. The fact that we lived in a military town near a target range also played its part; the roaring sound of a jet engine would give me full-body shivers. Back then, I could tell planes apart by their sounds alone. But then, when I was about 12, I learned I wouldn’t be able to become a pilot for health-related reasons. As my dream metamorphosed into an abiding interest in aviation, my life led me on a curious journey of becoming a programmer.

In 1992, we moved to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan,—and something very important happened: I got my first ZX Spectrum computer, and with it, my first video games. These days computers surprise no one, but in the early 90’s an owner of such a marvel would automatically become the luckiest kid around, a best friend, an enviable marriage prospect, and the toast of the town.

Our cassette tape had about 15 games, but the ones I was really crazy about were Dizzy and Jack the Nipper II (image taken from here); I even drew a map on graph paper for the latter. It’s too bad I didn’t save it.

Around the same time we started getting computer science lessons, and I was very lucky: we had an excellent teacher and a solid curriculum. This is when I learned that a computer meant not just games, but programming. A year later we moved, and my new school was lacking when it came to computer science; the curriculum took three years to cover what we could have learned in a year at my previous school. And because no one was going to change it for the sake of one person, I mastered graphics and assembler programs on my own ZX. I even had a thought about studying programming at the Kyrgyz Technical University.

An engineer by day, a guitar player by night

The competition for scholarships was insane; they were few and went first and foremost to school contest winners and those with straight A’s—and I was neither. We never could have afforded it on our own. So I chose the Technological Department and the field of mechanical engineering instead; I have a love for mechanisms, and the food industry has a lot to offer in terms of interesting mechanics and kinematics.

During the first two years, the boredom I got from the humanities and general subjects was alleviated by calculus, engineering graphics, physics, theoretical foundations of electronics, and—all of a sudden, starting in my second year—playing guitar.

Pictured: simple human happiness

I must say that music and I were not fast friends. When I was 6, I decided I wanted to play the violin, but my school only had a piano and an accordion. My father commented that he probably wouldn’t be able to find a piano in his garrison… My dizzying career as an accordion player lasted for three months, following which the instrument was abandoned and music was over and done with until my second year of university. That was when I mastered the guitar, learning to play both by myself and with kids who participated in amateur activities. We dabbled in Russian rock together.

I was getting a real kick out of my education and continued to play in the band, and I was no longer thinking much about programming.

Cigarette-making machine operator and newspaper designer rolled into one

Time came to go to work. The Bishkek of the early 2000’s wasn’t producing much: there was a meat-packing plant that turned into a bunch of warehouses, a milk plant that was barely making ends meet, a closed cannery, and a successful tobacco factory that had been bought out by the Reemtsma company. That last one wasn’t easy to get into, but the patronage of the head of my department did the trick.

I started out at the tobacco factory as an intern, rising through the ranks to become an operator of a cigarette-making machine and then a machine adjuster. The question I’ve most often heard from my friends is, “So how do they make cigarettes?” If you’re by any chance interested, here’s a video of a cigarette-making machine. It is not the model I operated, but it’s very similar.

That’s right, I operated a machine that made filtered cigarettes! :) Check out those awesome kinematics! That thing is fire!

In 2002, layoffs began, and the second wave hit me as well. I spent the severance pay on a brand-new Pentium III Celeron.

I dove back into video games and got dial-up internet. I got curious about how websites worked. Looking for information, I began learning PHP on my own. And, some time later, I designed my first website, dedicated to our band.

After the tobacco factory I got a job as a technical designer at a local paper. It wasn’t too difficult, but once a week, before submitting each issue, I’d stay up working on the layout until 1 or 2 a.m. Me and a colleague came up with a way to automatize the layout of identically formatted car ads (whiсh took up nearly 20 pages!), and from then on the issues would be gone to press by 10 p.m.

A mountain bike to keep me fit. Not exactly my passion, but I am no runner :)

At the same time, my musical career was seeing progress; there was a period when I played in two bands at once. The first one soon disbanded, as often happens with amateur lineups. The second one was a metal band my friends had asked me to join. It was more committed, plus I’d always gravitated towards a heavier type of music. We played rock venues for a few years. Making money was off the table; we could cover food and road-trip costs at best. We could have probably dedicated ourselves to evolving and getting good management and risen to the next level, but for us this was a hobby that demanded a lot of time and energy.

One time we recorded an arrangement of “Victory Day” for a town contest and unexpectedly placed first. The organizers proposed we record an album. We did, and although we weren’t satisfied with the result, we got to see the process “from the inside.” I learned what I could do on my own—and, more importantly, how. This led to me mastering sound recording programs and even to successful attempts at recording music in my own home.

Entering IT via SMS

In 2007, some friends offered me to try programming text message services (you may recall those being a thing in the mid-2000’s). However, the first couple of iterations constituted everything interesting that could be done there from the programming standpoint; what followed was standard copying and pasting. By that point, I’d already tried my hand at web developing and wanted to do it professionally, so a year later I left to work for another company where I developed a platform for job search websites. That was an amazing time spent with a fantastic team. I did a lot of PHP programming and worked there for 4 years before realizing I wanted something new: to work on products. And so in 2012, I moved to a big city that offered lots of opportunities. No, it wasn’t Moscow, which intimidated me with its population and road traffic. I opted for a slightly smaller city in Russia: Saint Petersburg.

Did you know? They put bags inside bags right on the street in St. Petersburg!

Here, I fully immersed myself into web design. I learned both by myself and in battle. First, I worked on automatizing targeted advertising, then spent a couple of years designing online chats for businesses. This was when a former colleague brought me into game development, to design games for social media. This was a true change of pace: a completely different format and a total knockout! We generated ideas, developed mechanics and animation, tested hypotheses. The most exhilarating thing about game development turned out to be the instant feedback: you could upload another update and immediately get live user reactions and statistics.

For me, the coolest thing about design is achieving a clear understanding of how you should realize the given goal, of the way it all breaks down into components. That, and the glorious flow state when your thoughts turn into a clear and consistent stream of code.

I got a handle on everything pretty quickly and, somewhat unexpectedly, became a team leader. And I realized that management was not my thing at all. My days consisted of meetings, planning, overseeing the team’s activities, giving feedback. At night I felt like a squeezed lemon, but without the sense of having done anything productive. Whatever coding I did was sporadic; there was no time to really get into it. I got so burned out I found another job practically in a day. And so I left to develop marketplace platforms.

In April 2020, we got transitioned to remote work. I’d never thought much about working from home before, but life had other plans. Communication with colleagues became more difficult; every problem started taking more time to solve. I got a fresh look at the project we were working on. I realized I wanted not to solve managers’ problems, but to work on products made for people—the kind of product made by Skyeng, for example. I was attracted by the fact that this place was truly about making its clients’ lives easier and improving their customer experience. Now I play a part in that, too :)

Flying substitution :) The instructor’s in the air; the healthiest mules keep running.

What happened to the dreams of flying?

Flight simulators have entered my life. The first time I tried to “fly” was back when I had the Spectrum, but that was nothing. About 10 years ago it suddenly occurred to me that flight simulators must have become fairly realistic by that point. I promptly installed Microsoft flight simulator X. For my money, it has an excellent beginner’s course on piloting built in. It offers the foundations of piloting and navigation for use in visual flights as well as the more advanced instrument flights.

Generally speaking, flight simulators differ from regular video games in the sense that they do not aim to entertain by themselves. It’s up to you to decide what you are going to do, whether it’s trying to land in challenging conditions, flying over mountains, or completing an online flight through VATSIM where you have to communicate with live air traffic controllers the way you would during an actual flight.

In these simulations, it’s equally cool to enjoy the view from the cabin and to land in bad weather. The plane gets tossed around, and you fly on instruments through the clouds. You follow your course, and… whoa! You’re flying straight towards the runway! You correct your steering angle, your thrust, and you get closer and closer... You’ve touched the ground! You align with the runway, hit the brakes, turn onto a taxiway, and… WHAM! It hits you!

So, in its own way, the dream came true. Right now I’m planning on upgrading my PC and trying out the new Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. If you too once wanted to become a pilot but ended up a programmer, don’t feel too bad about it—and try a flight simulator :)

Tips for Successful Remote Team Management

Maria Yanchauskayte — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 10:05:11 +0000

Managing a remote team can be difficult, but if you do it correctly, your team can have an enjoyable and productive work-from-home life. My team is scattered all over the world. Sometimes I can be discussing a bug with a QA engineer who is 6,034 miles away from me, in the US, while I’m here in Siberia. But in just 20 minutes, we’ll find a solution and in a week, the bug will be fixed.

Before Skyeng, I managed projects in an office and got used to the fact that I can always come up to someone and discuss an issue in person. So I hesitated a bit before accepting the offer. For me, it meant just throwing away all the tools I used at work. I’m an extravert, and I really need to see people, talk to them, feel their moods, and manage a team face-to-face. But in only nine months, I discovered many perks of remote work — all thanks to these simple rules.

4 Rules for Efficient Remote Teams

Clear routines, transparent processes, and personal contact are the main benefits of the office environment. An office gives you space for meetings, team building activities, and communication. At home, when you work alone and only see people in their profile pictures, it’s easy to lose touch with your team. The key to an efficient remote collaboration is the right environment.

1. Establish shared working hours

When you’re located in different time zones, it can be hard to work together. You may find it difficult to discuss issues, assign tasks, or collaborate with your team members, as well as other departments.

But it doesn't mean that you have to work according to one time zone. Just establish 4–5 hours that all team members share and can communicate within. For us, it’s 11 a.m. till 4 p.m.

2. Establish time limits for replying to messages
When I just started my work at Skyeng, I got very annoyed with people who didn’t reply straight away — I thought they were avoiding new tasks. But then I look at the situation from their perspective. They could be working on an issue, and my messages would be like someone yelling into their ear, “Reply! Reply now!”

So we agreed that we reply to messages in up to three hours. If someone’s working on a big task, they can put a status “Will reply after 5 p.m.” It sets clear expectations and makes everyone comfortable.

3. Aim for the result, not for the process
Let’s say, an employee finishes all their tasks — two hours before the end of their workday. The person gets anxiety: if I’m not doing anything, they’re gonna think I’m lazy and fire me. Their boss gets anxiety too: if I don’t watch employees, they don’t work.

Such a paradigm leads to pointless conflicts. To cut them off, we established that we judge each other’s work only by the results. For example, I promised my boss I’d finish this article in two weeks. Until then, no one’s gonna check on me or calculate my working hours. Completing the task and meeting the deadline are the only things that matter.

4. Give honest feedback
Honest doesn’t necessarily mean bad. When a team leader says “This could have been done better,” it may seem like they’re criticizing you. But the situation is more nuanced.

We believe in the “a bad decision, not a bad professional” principle. This puts things into perspective and helps you see that you’re not being criticized and that these people just want you to grow. Some negative feedback is inevitable, but in such cases, we always talk through video chat to have more context and see each other’s emotions.

4 Rules for Efficient Remote Team Meetings

At lunch, in the break room, over the water cooler — an office presents a lot of opportunities to talk about work. However, when you work remotely, you can plan these discussions and don’t get distracted during the day.

1. The person organizing a meeting is responsible for it. They add an event to the calendar, send invitations, prepare the agenda, and write the follow-up. By the way, most of our meetings last only 30 minutes.

2. Every meeting must have a goal, an agenda, and a follow-up. We always share a meeting agenda in advance. This way, we don’t waste 15–20 minutes just to set up the goal and background but dive right in.

In the beginning, I couldn’t understand why I should write down the follow-up for every meeting. Until I had a very unpleasant experience. In September 2019, we set up a process with another team. It worked well, but in December, just two days before my first vacation, something went wrong. I talked to that team saying something like, “But guys, we agreed on that.” But they didn’t recall anything. I scrolled back in the work chat only to realize that I didn't write down the results of that meeting in September and now nothing could prove my words. We had to set up a new process — much more urgently this time.

3. Turn your camera on. Emotions are the key to teamwork. Talking to a profile picture feels weird, while a video chat gives a sense of unity and cooperation.

Another thing is that it highlights problems people have with meetings. If someone turns their camera off to make a sandwich, maybe the meeting is not so important for them. Try to change the format to make it interesting and useful for every participant and not to waste anyone’s time.

4. Record meetings for future use. In March 2020, I came across a feature in a project that didn’t seem right. I couldn’t understand why it had been realized that way. I could go around and ask people about it. But luckily I had a recording of a meeting when that decision had been made. I listened to it a couple of times and got the idea. The problem was solved.

6 ways to Maintain a Strong Team Spirit

1. Short supportive meetings
Once, we worked on a large cross-team project. I was worried we wouldn’t meet the deadline because we were falling behind. Then, in just two weeks, my team completed their part and we finished on time. Trying to understand how they did it, I joined their retrospective meeting. Almost every team member noted that short stand-ups helped to sync, feel supported, and move forward faster.

2. Regular retrospectives
We hold retrospective meetings twice a week adjusting the agenda and format to the team’s needs. It boosts collaboration helping to make and realize decisions everyone supports and to achieve results that matter to each member.

3. Regular tech and business reviews

We hold two 45-minute long reviews a week.

At business reviews, we sync with our customers: product, marketing, and sales teams. We make sure that we understand the task and are going in the right direction. Tech reviews help to set rules and principles within the team, for example, how to migrate data from one CRM to another.

Regular reviews help to form a clear definition of done thus minimizing conflicts at the stage of development and time to market. The minimization of changes and corrections is another benefit.

Shared working space is the key to the success of such meetings. We use Miro for mind maps, Notion for project documentation, and Figma for mock-ups. These three tools are easy to use on any device; you don’t have to install Photoshop to open a .psd file a graphic designer sent you.

4. Public praise
Whenever one of my team members completes a cool project, I tag them in a work chat with a message “Look how cool! This person did great!” And if a data analyst finds numbers we didn’t know about that help us develop a project, I’ll praise them too.
Public praise works in two ways: it motivates the person while also giving the whole team a feeling that we’re working on something great.

5. Hobby clubs and speaking clubs
We have a Slack channel about workouts where people share their results and challenge each other. Seeing your colleagues achieve great results and knowing you could do the same ignites competition.

Coffee-buddies is another channel we have. It has a bot that automatically matches the members and suggests meeting for a cup of coffee or tea.

My team has a chat in the Telegram messenger. We share movie recommendations and set up offline meetings, for example, to go to an exhibition.

6. Online (and offline) parties

For each birthday in the team, we create a secret chat and choose a gift. Typically, it’s a gift certificate for books, sports equipment, escape rooms, or something else.

Skyeng also holds offline office parties several times a year with people coming from all over the globe. For the company’s birthday, parties are also organized by local communities all over the country.

Some teams get together once a year and go on a work trip — just for a change. In 2018, my team went to Abkhazia. Last year, we worked in Kazakhstan.

During quarantine, we started to meet online more often to support each other. This really helps to feel united and work as a team.

Final Remarks

If you were forced to work remotely because of the lockdown, it can be hard to stay connected with your team — I feel you. Try doing something from these lists and soon you’ll feel better and find that inspiration to work again.

Article by Oleg Krasikov, Project Manager at Skyeng

Coding Mentor: Why You Should Become One and How to Do It

Maria Yanchauskayte — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 08:26:12 +0000

Hi! My name is Oleg Sklyarov, I work as a team leader of kids mobile development at Skyeng. In my free time, I mentor IT students. It’s been a great experience for me, so I want to share my story and insights I got from it.

How I became a mentor

A couple of years ago, my average day looked pretty dull. I used to leave home at 9 am, come to work around 10, chat with my teammates over coffee before lunch, have lunch, watch some YouTube and actually start working around 3 pm. To get anything done, I had to stay at the office till 9 pm.

At some point, it hit me — where does all my time go? I leave home for 12 hours but get paid only for 8. So I did some calculations. The result was horrifying — 33% of my time went down the drain.

Insight #1: understand where your time is going

I was not satisfied with this result. Besides, I felt as I wasn’t growing as fast as I could. I had prospects of becoming a team leader in five years, maybe an architect in ten years. But this seemed very slow. I had the example of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in front of me — they achieved way more when they were my age.

Insight #2: it’s not that those guys are cool, it’s that I’m doing something wrong

At this point, realized that if want to be anywhere near Gates or Jobs, I need to change something about myself. I can become more productive and efficient if I make some adjustments.

Once, while browsing YouTube after lunch, I saw Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech. And it really changed something in me.

I realized all those guys — Steve, Bill, Mark Zuckerberg — share. Steve Jobs shared this video. I’m sure that’s not the only thing he did out of a free will. Bill Gates donated half of his wealth to charity and convinced half of the Forbes list to do the same. They share what they can — but I’d never even had such an idea.

Insight #3: if you do things the old way, they’re gonna stay the old way

I wanted to change something. First thing first, I changed my office job for a remote job at Skyeng. I didn’t get my four hours back — only two. But that was something to start with.

I looked at all those guys and thought — maybe I should try mentoring. I contacted my local university, then searched platforms for tutors. That’s how I found the place I work at now — an online platform with programming courses. Everything came together, and I became a mentor.

What I do now as a mentor

My job is to check students’ homework at Github and give feedback. We have consultations once a week via video chat. They ask questions, I answer them. Often they share their screen and we write the code together. Sometimes students text me their questions. Like, “how do I merge two arrays”. And I explain how to merge arrays. I’m like Google, but more advanced.

Sure enough, not everything goes smoothly. These are some of the most painful episodes:

I took too many students. At some point, I had five students — and that was too much. Grading homework and answering questions takes a lot of time, but mentoring doesn’t pay as good as programming. As a result, I spent more time working but earned less. My wife was not too happy about it.

I realized my knowledge of PHP was lacking. I’ve been programming in Yii Framework for ages and in Symfony for a couple of years. So when someone would ask, “How do I merge two arrays using plus, not array merge?” I’ld be like, “Let’s have a break.” I had to brush up my knowledge to explain it to them.

I didn’t set boundaries from the very beginning. And students can be rather intrusive. They can do nothing for the whole week and then show up like, “I’ve sent my push request, have you checked it? And now? Have you checked it now?” You need to set out the rules of your communication not to become some kind of robot.

It all was quite frustrating; I felt like my heroes betrayed me. I was thinking about going back to an office job but decided to give mentoring one last shot.

Insight #4: if you don’t succeed right away, don’t give up. Work on your mistakes and things might get better.

I made some adjustments and reaped the first results of my work. The rough patch was over.

Perks of being a mentor

Ego boost. When you do a project with your students and then an independent expert grades it 90 out of 100 and higher — that’s inspiring. I feel like, “Wow, look at them, they’ve actually learned something.”

Confidence reserve. For me, that’s feedback from my most annoying student. In the beginning, he criticized my every move and was always unhappy about something. But at the end of the course, he gave me 9 out of 10 and commented, “It used to suck, but now with your help everything is ok.” I re-read this comment whenever I feel down — it inspires me to go on.

Skills boost. I thoroughly upgraded my technical skills. At work, you sometimes use things without understanding how they work. But once you study them from the very beginning, it becomes much easier to find and fix bugs.

Soft skills boost. This one is my favorite. At my job, I manage a team of seven developers. Mentoring helped me become a better manager. Since I interact with many people, I learned different approaches and types of motivation. Now I know exactly how to motivate my programmers.

Work on your mistakes and things might get better.
I made some adjustments and reaped the first results of my work. The rough patch was over.

Why you should be a mentor

Once I met a guy from my old job. I told him about my mentorship — and he didn’t quite understand why I was doing it. I explained it to him and will explain to you:

Making a difference. For me, being a mentor is about being proactive. Today you don’t need a PhD to teach, you can share what you know and use at your job. If you’re not happy with the educational system in your country, you have every chance to change it. I’m happy to be a part of that change.

Boosting your skills. As I already said, teaching immensely grows your own skills. You’ll get tons of insights about programming and engineering. Besides, you’ll get better at communicating with people and managing them. These two points will help you with your main career.

Investing in the future. Many people wonder why I do mentoring instead of taking two extra hours of work. For me, that’s like investing — I invest in myself by growing my skills and in other people by helping them grow. I think it’s more wholesome than stacking paper.

If my story resonated with you, give mentoring a try. It’s really simple, and it has a real tangible impact on people around you and the professional community.

Thank you for reading! 🙏

If you have any questions, ask away in the comments. Let’s grow together!

Cheers,
Oleg Sklyarov

6 Remote Productivity Tips for Team Work

Maria Yanchauskayte — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 08:25:48 +0000

by Aleksey Kataev, leads the development team at Skyeng company

At the moment due to coronavirus, all Skyeng teams work from home. For us, the shift to remote work was much easier than for many teams who are used to the office environment. At Skyeng, 90% of employees and contractors have been working remotely since their first day.

With seven years of experience, we’re now experts in productive remote collaborations. Here are 6 key tips for those who are new to working from home.

Video chat regularly

Live communication is the key to productivity. When you cannot talk face to face, use video chat. At Skyeng, we try to talk through video to everyone we work with. We use video chat to make an offer, to onboard a new hire and then every day at work. We ask people to use real photos for profile pictures in all messengers. This makes communication more personal.

For important calls, we make records and share them with colleagues who couldn't come to the meeting. Team leaders use those records to assess new employees after some months at the company. Or, if an applicant would be a good fit for a different job at the company, a team leader can send a recorded interview to another team.

We even have informal gathering via video chat. Teams choose a topic and exchange opinions on it. That’s how we get to know each other.

Some teams meet offline, for example at a bar. For those who achieve their KPI targets, offline trips are paid by the company. People are usually very surprised when they see their co-workers for the first time, very often about the hight. “Oh, I didn’t know you’re this tall!” It’s great to meet people you work with in real life. Hopefully, the pandemic won’t last forever, and we will go back to this practice.

Define and describe your processes

Sometimes we hire people who have never worked from home. For them, the shift can be hard — with all the agendas and meeting notes, planning and always being online. To make their life easier, we created a simple onboarding process. We explain how to get access to all the services or find Slack channels they’ll need.

The work routine can be very different depending on a team: marketing, partnerships projects, content lab or tech support. But all new hires go through a well-defined onboarding process. First, they get to know Skyeng’s mission, then learn about our processes and meet their teammates. Then they do their first assignments and get into the workflow.

We store all our guides and instructions in Notion and update them regularly. It helps us scale up our processes easily.

Make your workflow transparent

We try to give our employees as much freedom as possible. They can work on their own schedule and pace as long as the job is done. But it’s important to keep in mind that remote work is not the same as freelance work. That’s why we make our processes transparent — when anyone can see what is being done at the moment. This way people know when a task will be completed and can plan their day accordingly.

Some managers may still have doubts that people will work productively from home. How to control them? There are some extreme methods like daily standups or screen tracking. But at Skyeng, we don’t use them.

To make their workflow transparent, our developers keep work logs, our designers use sprints and track their work time in Trello. We also set targets and plan our work for the next month, quarter and year. Targets are then split into projects, projects are split into steps and steps are split into concrete tasks. That’s how at any moment we can estimate the progress and make adjustments.

Highlight the importance of self-discipline and personal planning

Remote work has many pluses like no commute or never being late or an opportunity to travel more. But there are also some downsides. People who are used to working in an office 9 to 5 may find it harder to concentrate at home. Sometimes people have trouble separating work from personal life and find themselves not leaving their home for several days in a row.

To make the shift to remote work easier, we created online courses on time management and organizing your working routine. We explain that it’s better not to start your day by checking Trello notifications in bed and that it’s a good idea to set time when you stop working.

Set tasks right

When team members don’t see each other, it’s very important to highlight how they affect the result of a team and the company. When setting a task, explain why it’s important for target metrics. Don’t give out tasks with unclear goals like “move this button to the left” or “create a text for a landing page.”

When working with production teams, people usually come to a team leader or product manager first. They fill out a task request together and define the job to be done and the expected result. It doesn’t work out perfectly every time but helps set more clear goals in most cases.

Motivate through feedback

When you start working from home, it might find it hard to manage a team and keep up with your co-workers. How do you motivate people not just to do their job but to go beyond?

At Skyeng, we value feedback — from our students and teachers and from our colleagues. It helps up become better. Every team holds retrospective meetings and discusses their achievements and fails. We analyze what we do and make adjustments if necessary.

We also host George Live — an online meeting with our CEO George Soloviev where he shares strategic plans and talks about new prospects for the company. This helps teams set their goals and plan their work according to the company’s strategy.

————
These tips are taken from Skyeng’s experience and books on business process management and can be applied to any workflow, remote or in an office. Even after the coronavirus pandemic is over, they will be a good addition to your work routine.

Managing Github: through Terraform to a self-written Ansible tool

Maria Yanchauskayte — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 11:45:03 +0000

by Igor Plekhov, Developers Support Team Lead at Skyeng company.

We have 350+ users and 400+ repositories at Github. There can be more than one admin in each repository. And they do whatever they want. Of course, afterwards, any of them can be unaware of what the other has done. When we, the Infrastructure team, got tired of suffering and managing all those things manually, we decided to go to centralized management; Infrastructure as Code.

And as a platform, we chose Terraform.

“I have blocks with letters S, H, I…”

In theory, everything seemed smooth. Terraform is a popular tool. It will be easy to find people who have experience using it.. It has state and TF makes resources to conform - we can be sure at any time that the working configuration is equal to what we’ve written. No need to browse through the web user interface anymore - look into the config and you are in.

We ran into Github’s rate limits. First of all, TF reads everything and changes what it has after that. With our size, it took about 20 minutes. And we had to wait an hour for the next possible change as we got into limits on the number of API calls.

To solve the problem with the rate limits, we broke down all the stuff into six parts:

1.Organization members
2.Repositories
3.Teams
4.Team members
5.Team repositories
6.Collaborators

From now on, typical operations are carried out in two steps. To add a new developer, run Terraform with different parameters: 1 and 4. To add a new repository, run 2 and 5. It turned out to take quite a long time. Run TF once, come back in a few minutes, run it once more. Then come back again - to reply to the request’s author: everything done. Or it was not done if there was an error somewhere in the config. One time we have been given a pull request where, in several places, a Russian с was used instead of an English c. They look like two peas in a pod, yet they are different. It took a couple of hours to hunt it down.

Horrible syntax. Description of anything is quite a mouthful. Here is an example:

As such things are usually copy-and-pasted, and then *something is being changed, it’s quite simple to change that *something incompletely or to remove something excessive. Put a dash instead of an underscore - and nobody will notice it. Any error costs minutes of waiting. Imagine a debug with minutes between steps...

It’s impossible to reference resources by names, it’s only allowed by identifiers. Resources - repositories - are described in a file, while variables with their ID in another. Users and teams alike. Also, a repository’s parameters are in different places, as well as a list of teams who have access to it. And collaborators are somewhere in a third location. When a typical question arises - who has access to this repo? - try to gather everything together.

The approach “look into the config and you are in” does not work. “Teams’ repositories” is a relation of many-to-many. Everything is in a single file of thousands of lines. How do you sort such a list? By repositories? By teams? The answer is: there is no way. New records are added to the end or in the middle at random. Collecting everyone who has access to a particular repo is a distinct task.

In a few months after deployment of TF, it was especially interesting to get to know that some repositories were still made manually. And now when demanded to give someone access to them, we cannot do that as Terraform knows nothing about it! Sure, this issue can be solved: remove repo and make it again with TF, or reinitialize TF itself. But...

Why the hell it’s so hard!

Adding a user to an organization is just one API call. Give rights to a team on a repo - the same. Finally, Terraform started to crash on the management of teams with the words like it’s about to remove 800 resources, then add 801 of them, and for some reason it cannot do that. Then we commenced by thinking about how it would be in an ideal world.

Changes are applied pointedly.
Simple syntax, comprehensible without any manuals. No excessive words like resource, value and identifiers like 123456 - which nobody knows where to get them from.
All the parameters of an entity - e.g. repository - lay in one place.
One repo / team / organization - one file.

Converted to YAML

Organization

Team

Repository

Wished to find a turnkey solution, but have not succeeded - then had to write it out

Maybe TF is a clever thing. But in our case, it turned out to be a Procrustean bed. We went to make our own solution with Ansible, which we use heavily to manage our infrastructure.

It sorts typical tasks out in mere seconds. It takes only a few API calls, a few dozens for big projects. It’s easy to use in CI/CD. All parameters are collected in a single file, so all changes are local, they are easily trackable. Now it’s a real thing - look in a config file and you are in. Everything you need is at your fingertips. Link to code is at the very end and now a pair of examples.

Now, we can make a new repository like this:

To do something with a team like this:

If it’s necessary to update all the teams, we simply omit the parameter:

And a sudden cherry on top of the cake. We have LDAP, and whenever it’s possible, we use it for authentication. There the username of a person consists of their full name. And this is much better than a nickname invented in a stormy youth, understandable only by its owner. Now we can use people’s real names while managing Github too.

If you’d like to try our solution

It can be found here.

I’m a 14-Year-Old Developer

Maria Yanchauskayte — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 14:38:00 +0000

Editor’s note: In a big team where most people know each other only through Slack profiles, there’s plenty of space for funny incidents. For instance, someone once asked for a webinar on how to make Slack bots. George volunteered to speak. After the event, someone commented in chat, “Hey, you sound really young.” And that’s how I found out that George is actually a school student working part-time with a couple of projects featured on Product Hunt.

George BougakovFollow

i push buttons

When I was seven, my dad bought our first Arduino and we built a toy for our cats. It was a laser pointer connected to two servo motors — it showed a red dot that our cats chased. My dad wrote the code, and I tried to understand how it worked. That was my first experience with C++.

I soon realized that C++ is a bit too complicated for a first-grader. But I really got into programming, so my dad suggested trying Scratch. When I outgrew it, he showed me a couple of moves in Python. Then it was a classic story: a web page, jQuery, JS frameworks and Node.js. And here I am.

How I learned English by reading the documentation

It started with Arduino. It didn’t have any decent documentation in Russian, and the official site was all in English. I knew some basic language from school, but my English teacher couldn’t help with technical texts. My IT teacher wasn’t of much help either — he taught us how to use Paint.

So I opened Google Translate and tried to read the text at arduino.cc. As I knew some English, I translated only some words, not the whole page.

With Scratch, my English got to the next level. The community speaks English, and to become a part of it, you need to know the language really well. People may come across your project and write a review or ask to borrow a feature. It’s like a very basic open source. After becoming a part of the community, I lost my fear to comment and reply to people in English. I started to really use the language as a tool.

It came in handy when I started to play with Python and JS: if you know English, you can really go places with those.

My pet projects

I had more than 50, but I’m gonna speak about five.

My first GitHub commit was November 1st, 2015, a Python game
No plot — you just navigate a ship (a triangle) and pop bubbles (circles). The graphics are drawn on the go.

My first web page. Initially, it was a homepage for my browser — just a search bar and three buttons: Open in Google, Open in Wolfram Alpha, Open on YouTube. It didn’t even have CSS, but it was still good for the first try. I went on to play with different APIs.

Then I accidentally built a Telnet honeypot. I was bored in a computing class so I tried to connect Google to Telnet. I built a server using this protocol that could send requests to search results. Telnet is mostly used for configuring routers now, so my server attracted many scamming bots. But the server just logged their commands instead of following them. It was hilarious: a bot would find a server, think it’s a router, send commands trying to reset it — but only got search results from Google.

The web interface of Que — a tool for collaborative playlists.

The first time I was featured on Product Hunt. In the summer of 2018, I was looking through some Apple documentation and noticed that they had a web API for music. And we had this problem at school: at any party, people would fight to put their music on. So I wanted to make a service for collaborative playlists: you put it together on your phone or computer, your friends scan the QR code, add their own songs and then vote for the song to play next.

426 votes for Que and finished #3 in Product of the Day. I had to close the project because Apple changed their API and then Facebook released its own app — I couldn’t compete with that.

I uploaded Que on Product Hunt. It took 10 minutes: I filled in an application, got a reply, “We’ll feature you but please change the description, it sucks.” I said, “Ok.”

Docket — Tinder for grocery shopping. Another project that did really well on Product Hunt. The concept was like this: imagine yourself standing in front of the empty fridge. You’re trying to think about what do you need to buy. Or you can open an app and swipe through groceries — and build your shopping list.

I found this idea on requestforproduct.co, an international site for project ideas.

I had to scroll down to the fifth page of Google to find data for the app. The previous ones only had branded data sets. But in the depths of search results, I found a link to GitHub. Someone compiled a dataset of unbranded products (milk, bread). I turned it into an Excel file and sorted the list according to popularity so that milk would come before olives as people buy it more often.
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But the best thing happened when Product Hunt posted a link to my app on their Twitter.

It started to get traffic from social media, and someone commented, “Hey, everything’s cool, but change the ‘yes’ swipe to the right, like in Tinder.” But I was 13, I had no idea how it was on Tinder! My parents were very amused.

How I got a job at Skyeng

I spoke better English than anyone in my school, but I still wanted to improve it. My parents signed me up for language courses. They were alright, but the commute felt like a waste of time. So I started to study online at Skyeng.

But I didn’t only study English, I was also sending feedback on the platform. At some point, product managers at Skyeng created a Telegram chat for active users like me. There I posted bug reports — nothing critical, but still curious. One time, I noticed that when I used the Vimbox platform on my iPad, the smooth scrolling didn’t work. So I texted something like, “I guess fixing this part of CSS can help.” I didn’t just complain about bugs, I suggested solutions, provided logs, and details. And at some point, I got a message from Vlada, the Head of Kids and Junior team. She invited me to an internship in her team.

Vlada invites me to become an intern.

I replied with, “Thanks, I’ll think about it.” I just didn’t know what to say. So I asked my dad. After the whole product Hunt story he wasn’t even surprised. He said it was a good offer: work from home, flexible schedule, great experience. I had an interview via video chat — and got the job. I didn’t even do the test assignment.

My dad had to do some paperwork: in Russia, 14-year-olds can work, but you’ll have to do a medical check-up and get approval from a local social security office. It takes some time.

Skyeng is known for its remote teams, but they also have an office in Moscow. I’ve been there a couple of times.

I started working on a simple tasks team. The guys were busy with landing pages and had quite a lot of requests for Slack bots in their backlog. I guess they thought, “We have a developer who knows JS but doesn’t know PHP. You can write bots in JS, so maybe he’s the one for the job?” So I became one of two people working on bots for developers and other teams.

I think it was a good start. I couldn’t mess up something really important, and even if I did, the damage was not so bad. Like, once I used the wrong SQL keyword: it worked fine on the test base but actually required a lot of memory. Someone had to kill my request to the real database as it took a solid couple of minutes and the monitoring system started alerting about abnormally high load.

First tasks

At first, I was mentored by Alex @deusdeorum Kataev, the team leader for one of the key teams at the time. When I got added to Slack, I got a message from him, “Hi, I want to make our development more automated.” He also suggested ideas for two bots.

My first bot guaranteed that an important message is read. We called it Yellbot.

With hundreds of chats in Slack, important messages often get lost. Tagging someone doesn't guarantee they will read the message. So we thought of a solution for critical messages — a bot that renews the notification every minute until the person clicks “I read it” button under the message. I wrote that bot in a week, and people still use it.

Then I wrote Jake, a bot for automated tech reviews. Before that, a team leader would manually collect tickets, sort them out, post on the team’s channel and ask people to vote. The whole thing took about an hour and was quite boring. Now Jake creates a list of tasks based on a request, posts a poll in the channel and shows the results. As more teams are introducing tech reviews, the bot saves days of work.

My cats =^·.·^=

I created several dozens of bots after that, from the simplest (that would greet newcomers in a channel and ask to read the rules) to more complicated ones, for example, a knowledge base interface or a tool for automated analytics.

I loved it. On Product Hunt, people would talk about my project for a couple of days and then forget about it. Now I create something people will use for many months or even years.

How I work and study at the same time

I’m in grade 8 now. I study at school #57 in Moscow. Recently, it introduced an intensive program in computer science. Several hundred students applied, from other schools and even cities — it was an open call. I really wanted to get in. So I asked Alexander Laryanovsky, a managing partner at Skyeng, to write me a letter of recommendation.

I guess my internship helped me to get to the program. The letter of recommendation worked like a charm.

We have tons of computing classes: two on Mondays, another two on Thursdays and six on Saturdays. It’s an advanced course, we learn about algorithms, code in C++, and study calculus (my “favorite” part).

We go on field trips to IT companies too. I’m not the only one in my class who’s seriously into programming — one of the guys writes pretty decent games.

We have seven or eight classes Monday through Friday and another nine on Saturday, so I don’t work every day. I’m now even allowed to work full-time until I’m 16. Usually, I come home from school, have lunch, procrastinate for a little while, work if I have time and feel like coding and then do my homework.

My three screens: one for Slack, one for documentation and another one for VS Code.

When my team gets a new task, people add me to the chat and ask to estimate the deadline. I judge according to my previous projects but warn people from the start that it can take me a week or two. If the customer needs a result as soon as possible, they can go to more experienced developers. Or if there’s no rush, I take the task.

Every two weeks, I sync with my project manager on my work. Sometimes co-workers review my code. And I also log my working time in Jira, uploading it from Toggl for more accuracy.

How I spend my earnings. I spend part of my money on subscriptions and software for personal projects:

WolframAlpha — helps me with maths
Bloomberg — my go-to resource for international news
Pillow, the sleep tracker — I realized the importance of good sleep
Hetzner — hosting for my personal server
Zeit.co — hosting for projects with Node.js
DigitalOcean — for storage
iCloud 2Tb — for backups
1Password — can’t imagine my life without it
and Netflix, Nintendo Switch Online, Apple Music and other services

How work changed my life

My goal for 2020 is just to get through it (note: I wrote this part in December 2019, and now it’s becoming an actually real goal 😂). A big plus having a job as a developer at a big company developer is that now I can go to conferences. My dad works at Mail.ru (a Russian internet company), they host a lot of events. I used to ask him for a guest pass, but now I can just say that I work at Skyeng and get a pass. I mostly go to conferences on front-end and mobile development.

Chrome Developer Summit at the Mail.ru headquarters, November 2019.

Last summer I had some free time and applied for an internship for front-end developers at Yandex (a Russian internet corporation). I almost got accepted. I did a test assignment online and was invited for an interview. Everyone was surprised when I showed up. According to the rules, you had to be 18 to apply, but Technology Distribution Director at Yandex made an exception for me. But I still have to be 18 to get an offer.

I’m loving it™

And now I’m sure I want to work in IT. After school, I’ll apply to one of the top universities in Russia or try to get into college abroad.

I work as a developer, run a bar and an escape room — all at the same time

Maria Yanchauskayte — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 15:06:32 +0000

Andrey Rybnikov, 34, is a developer at Skyeng, Russian EdTech company. He’s afraid that in 15–20 years younger programmers will take all the best jobs — so he needs a plan B. Andrey decided to start his own business without quitting his main job.

Let's get started!

I started programming when I was 14 and then got a diploma in software engineering. Many years and jobs later I found myself as a PHP developer at a bank in Khabarovsk (it’s a city in the Far East of Russia and my hometown). I wanted to write creative code, but in reality, I was a system analyst, project manager, and whatnot. I quitted a couple of years later.

How I started to work remotely before it became mainstream

As soon as I posted my resume online, I was contacted by ABBYY, a Russian company for translation software. At the time, I couldn’t imagine myself working from home seven time zones away from Moscow. I worried that I’d feel lonely and isolated.

I also worried that I’d fail to make myself to work.

After my bank job, I felt burnt out. But it turned that work tasks can actually be pretty interesting. It was more difficult to make myself to take a break. I had to set up reminders on my phone: “Do a stretch”, “Have lunch”, “Get some tea”. Otherwise, I could sit down in front of the monitor the whole day. It took me about six months to get used to the new schedule, then I started to take breaks without reminders.

What does a developer at a bank do? Decorates his office for a week

But there was one thing that bothered me. I could not influence the product. All the decisions were made in the head office in Moscow, but I didn’t want to move there. I wanted to travel and live someplace warmer.

Classic Khabarovsk weather

One of my friends was interviewing for Skyeng and learned that you could get $800 for referring a developer.

He suggested splitting the money.

I did the test assignment and all rounds of interviews. But it turned out that for my friend to get the money I had to complete my assessment period. I didn’t mind.

Besides, at Skyeng almost everyone works remotely and has a tangible impact on the product. And yes, we did split the money.

How I work four and seven hours ahead of the head office

At the moment, I work from Vietnam and I’m actually closer to the team — only four hours ahead instead of usual seven.

And I even met one of our QA engineers offline (he’s on the left)

But I still live in Khabarovsk for the best part of the year. I have my own schedule to synchronize with Moscow — I start working around 11 am and write code till about 4 pm. Then we have team meetings.

For the Halloween meeting, I showed up like this. My team liked it

Once I’m done with meetings, I’m free. Usually it’s around 7 pm local time or even earlier. I’m very lucky — neither ay Skyeng nor at ABBYY no one tried to micromanage me as long as the work is done.

How I decided to start a business and opened an escape room

Remote work gives you for a lot of free time while providing a stable income. It got my creative juices flowing, and I decided to work a side project.

One of my friends, also an IT guy, wanted to open an escape room. He asked me to help with hardware, software, and financing.

Our escape room started with a floor plan

We found a room in the semi-basement of an office center in the center of the city. The owner had never heard of escape rooms, but he believed in us. We built everything with our own hands. The storyline mostly took place in the dark so we didn’t bother much about the design.

I’m not gonna tell you the whole story, but the main idea was like that: escapers split into two teams. The first team has to do tasks in the complete darkness, the second one watches them via night vision camera and gives directions. Then they switch places. My job is not to let them escape.

A couple of times, I was the antagonist — a serial killer. That’s what the second team saw via night vision cams

We assembled all the video equipment, night vision cams, monitors, etc. ourselves. Then it took me about a month to program the website, the booking system, the equipment for special effects.

Testbed for the equipment software

We invested about $5,000 and got it back in less than a year. The escape room is still in operation and pays $350–500 a month without any additional cost. The funny thing is that we had a second concept with a better story, design, and tech, but it was not as successful. At the time I was already working on my second project — a restaurant.

How I opened a gastropub

I’m very curious about what will happen to us, the developers, when we’re in our 50’s. In the end, our job requires fast and flexible thinking.

I don’t rule out the scenario where in 10–15 years programming will become not so easy for me and my job will be taken by the younger generation. By that time, I want to live somewhere on the seaside and write code for free. So I started working on the backup plan.

After launching the escape room, my friend and I realized that we were pretty good at business. And we’d had this idea of a restaurant for ages. First, we wanted to buy a franchise but were not fast enough — while we were contemplating, all the goods ones got taken. So we decided to do our own thing and open a gastropub for men in their 30’s and 40’s.

According to rough calculations, to open such a place would cost $130,000.

Our friend, also an IT guy, became the third investor. One half of the investment was our own money and the second one was a loan. We couldn’t get a loan for a small business (it’d rather tricky in Russia) so applied as private individuals.

The concept of our restaurant in one pic (Translation: If you’re hungry, we’ll give you food. If you’re thirsty, we’ll give you a drink. If you’re lonely, we’ll give you a hug)

We bought a dying restaurant for $65,000 — almost a steal. It was far from the picture we painted for ourselves but still a restaurant, with a kitchen, chefs and waiters.

We didn’t know a thing about running a restaurant. In the first months, we just observed what was going on. We invested another $10,000 in equipment, ingredients and other stuff.

Then we decided to close the place for a month and renovate it completely.

Here are our costs:
$35,000 — wall siding with wood panels and tiles
$1,800 — sign
$8,000 — rent
$13,000 — wages for the staff
$1,100 — paperwork

As we were getting ready for the grand opening, each of us took two weeks off work. My colleagues at Skyeng were a bit worried that the business would suck me in and I’d never come back to develop our new billing system.

But we settled everything with the restaurant rather quickly and went back to our main jobs.

The concept of our pub is built around rock music. Occasionally we host cover gigs for bands like AC/DC

All three of us have families with little kids. But family cafes are obnoxiously boring while fun places are not very kid-friendly. We tried to take that niche in between.

And we’re lucky to have the greatest chef. We come up with with crazy ideas all the time and he always finds a way to realize them. For instance, once we decided that we needed a 6.5 lbs (3 kg) burger. Usually people order that for a company. But whoever eats it alone in 30 mins, gets it for free.

Anton, our chef, with the notorious burger

IT guys are not necessarily the greatest managers, but I see how we can contribute to other spheres. We made a lot of mistakes and lost a lot of illusions on the way, like we forgot to count in the ad costs or first kept the old, not very motivated staff.

What works on highly-motivated developers, didn’t always work on the restaurant staff

I wanted to use the same approach to management we used at Skyeng, with one-to-ones, no fines and minimum control. Well, it didn’t work. We had to bring the fines and control back.

I realized that I wouldn't become the boss of the year. But it doesn’t bother me. As a developer, I can decompose a task, see which part doesn’t work and fix it.

For example, we started using iiko, an automated delivery registration system, from the very first days. The staff tried to mess with it and say it wouldn’t work. But they forgot I’m a programmer :-) The problem was fixed.

Now my city has a place where I can have drinks with friends or a Sunday brunch with my family.

And we’ll see where it gets in 15 years.

Thank you for reading! 🙏

If you have any thoughts on this post please leave comments below.

How to Grow as a Developer if You Live in a Small Town

Maria Yanchauskayte — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 09:20:44 +0000

by Sergey Zhuk, back-end developer at Skyeng.

Hi! My name is Sergey. I live in Bryansk, Russia. It’s far from Palo Alto — both literally and figuratively. It’s a small town 400 km (249 mi) from Moscow. It held its first IT conference this summer, and there’s not a single business here whose name you would recognize. But it didn’t stop me from publishing several books on programming (which are selling) and speaking at conferences and international podcasts.

I’m not just bragging. A couple of years ago, I had no clue what SOLID stood for. For many years, I had been going with the flow until I found myself stuck in a rut. But then I came around — and now I’m going forward faster than ever.

I hope you can learn from my experience — my solutions are easy and simple and don’t require much investment. And if you too became a successful developer without leaving your hometown, share your story in the comments.

How I found myself on the slippery slide but didn’t give in

My story is like many others — I got into computers at school, bought my first book on programming, went to university to study IT. With one exception — I knew English ever since I was a kid.

My family was not especially well-off, but my parents always took my education very seriously. They sent me to a school with a focus on English language. I also studied with a tutor. By the time I finished school, I could read and write pretty decently.

In the next 10 years, I put those skills to almost no use.

Four of my friends and I worked from an office in Bryansk for a Moscow business.

The same goes for everything I learned at uni. Don’t get me wrong, I’m super grateful to my professors. But the curriculum was rather hectic and outdated. I had some scattered knowledge of C, C++, PHP, .NET, algorithms, and even neural networks. But I didn’t know what to do with it. I had a couple of job interviews. I got to read their documentation — it was all Greek to me. My future looked rather bleak, but then I was invited to work as an outsourcer.

The money was good — I had no reason to quit. I had no motivation to learn something new either.

One day the firm just shut down. For the first time in five years, I was looking for a job. I quickly realized I wasn’t up for the competition. Recruiters asked about some features — but I’d never heard of them.

I had to face the sad truth — I degraded. I needed a new strategy. I stopped sending out résumés and decided to find a strong team to grow up to (and I did). I wrote down everything I needed to learn and dove right in.

How to write a technical blog and don’t give up while you have no readers

At every interview, I wrote down everything I had to know — but didn’t. I found a this-time-definitely-a-temporary job for $600 a month and started to catch up with the world of programming. I was surprised how much English I still remembered (good thing I had studied it for 10 years as a kid). I found information mostly in English — it was more up-to-date and there was just more of it.

I wanted to organize all my notes in a convenient and searchable way. I thought of an electronic text posted online. A blog looked like a perfect solution. I was writing in English because I was reading mostly in English. And the language itself is just more fit for writing about programming. I needed no inspiration — I mostly wrote about things I’d just learned myself. I would jot down a couple of pages every evening. I had no readers — but wasn’t bothered as I did it for myself.

There’s no chance you don’t know something once you wrote a blog post about it. Recently I had my milestone — 100 posts

One year later, I found a new great job. But I didn’t feel like giving up my blog — on the contrary, I wanted to share my knowledge. Asynchronous PHP was becoming a thing, and I tried ReactPHP for one of my tasks. I could not find any information about it even in English, so I wrote my own article based on my experience. I posted a link on Twitter tagging the developers behind ReactPHP — and they reposted it. My blog got good traffic. After that, I started to post links to my blog on PHPtoday, Reddit, HackerNews, AwesomePHP, and other big resources. I rarely respond to comments — good or bad — not to waste time. I just post links to promote my blog.

I was featured in PHP Weekly digest a couple of times — that’s about 14k subscribers. I got noticed by Roman Pronsky; now he features my articles in PHP Annotated Monthly in Jetbrains blog and PHP Digest on Harbr (by the way, they have an amazing Telegram channel).

I still have plenty of topics to write about. For instance, how I wrote a tool for developing long-running applications. Or how we improved the process of code review in our team. The blog is now two years old and has several thousands readers every month. It means people need it.

Besides my wish to help people and spread the knowledge, I also have a rather pragmatic interest. I learned my lesson from four years ago. If I ever need to look for a job again(knock on wood!), it shouldn’t be me who comes to employers. They should come to me and offer me a job. My blog helps to build a personal brand. The next step is videos!

How to make screencasts in English and why you should do it

As my audience grew bigger, I got into self-improvement — I was reading books and watching tutorials. And I paid for them. That’s how I got the idea — to show the screen while coding and commenting on it. That’s not rocket science, I could do that too.

All the cuteness on my channel is brought to you by my cat Busya

Besides, some people prefer to read, and others prefer to watch videos. So I decided to turn some of my blog posts into screencasts. Again, I just did it for myself. I was subscribed to Jeffrey Way’s Laracasts at the time, and I really loved his approach. He tried to make his videos perfect to every little detail — no misprints in code or five-minute pauses for installation. I found his mini-course on making screencasts, studied his tips on the soft and the recording and editing process and started my channel.

I have 1.3k subscribers, my most popular video has more than 9k views

I’ve heard that in TV shows one minute of screen time equals one day of work. In screencasts, one minute of screen time equals about one hour of work. I choose a topic, write the code, make sure it works and then write the script for the video. Then I record the video — just the screen without comments. I record the voiceover separately and then edit everything together.

What do I get from that

People invite me to conduct webinars in English. Screencasts do a great job of promoting my manner of delivering information. And as there are very few experts on ReactPHP, my name is on the first page of Google search results on the topic.

That’s something :-)

So one day I opened my email and found an invitation from NomadPHP(their community has about 3k people). Several months later, I sat down in my Bryansk apartment, checked my humble microphone and spoke for an international audience. The presenter, who was from Wisconsin, said I had a better accent than he did (I’m always amazed how good foreigners are at complimenting people). I proposed a topic for a second webinar on my own initiative — they loved it and organized it in no time.

People invite me to speak on podcasts. My first talk was in English. While speaking fairly good English, I didn’t have much experience of traveling or talking to natives. But I got invited to PHP Roundtable.

I had to talk to these three guys in English. I was super nervous. I had a newborn daughter and was very worried about her crying in the background. Good thing it was summer, and my wife could take her for a walk.

All the rest was pretty standard. We agreed on time and topics, checked the connection 30 minutes before going live and recorded the meet-up through a video chat with local voice backup.

I publish books on Amazon and Leanpub. When people hear that I’ve written several books, they are shocked. Well, my books are not printed — I just collected my blog posts in PDF-files and uploaded them to Amazon and other sites. I turned down all offers to print the books. With electronic copies, I get almost everything people pay for the book, but with hard copies, I’d get only about 5%.

Perhaps my time as a senior developer costs more, but that’s still enough to buy treats for my daughter

The idea came to me when I already had a lot of information on certain topics. I thought some people would rather have one searchable file on their computer than go to my site to look for the information they need. Books will also bring me more traffic. I spent four months compiling articles into a book, uploaded it and then mentioned in my blog. The first purchase happened in an hour. Not a bad conversion rate! Now I repeat these steps whenever I have enough new material and inspiration.

I found an illegal copy of my book once — but those people deleted it as soon as I asked. I don’t charge much, prices start from $6. People can pay more if they want

I meet new interesting people. Alexey Pylitsin, the Russian translator of PHP documentation, volunteered to translate my book. At every meet-up, someone comes up to me and says, “Thank you for your blog, that article was really helpful!” I’m always glad to hear that.

I speak at conferences and meet-ups. It’s a whole new experience for me. My town doesn’t have an IT community. I was about to reach out to the PHP community in Rostov-on-Don when my company hired people to promote IT meet-ups and send us to conferences.

In just a couple of months, I came all the way from my first conference talk to my first application for a big conference (they accepted me, with all travel expenses and accommodation provided). Now my family doesn’t see me a couple of weekends a month, but my wife knows it grows my worth. I’m not looking for a job, but I did get a pay raise ;-)

Almost all of this happened in the last 18 months. A couple of years ago I didn’t know what SOLID was. All I want to say is that if I could do it, you can do it too.

Never stop growing. And share your stories in the comments.

Back to the Basics: Why a Programmer Moved to a Farm

Maria Yanchauskayte — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 11:51:14 +0000

How a developer started an eco settlement in East Belarus. By Georgy Novik.

Hi! My name is Georgy Novik, I’m a back-end developer at Skyeng. My job is to add utility to our CRM system and implement cool features for customer service like bots for tech support and robocall solutions.

As many other developers, I can work from anywhere. I could go to live on Bali or work from a coworking or never leave my couch. But I chose a quite different option — I moved to a farm in Belarus*. Well, it’s not exactly a farm like in the US, but you get the idea. Now I live 80 miles away from the nearest coworking.

*Belarus is a country in Eastern Europe with the population of about 9 million people. The capital city is Minsk.

Moving to a farm

I was born and raised in a village. At school, I really got into physics so after graduation I continued to study it at the University of Grodno. In my free time I was programming in JavaScript and later PHP.

In the middle — me at the university

At some point, I dropped out and went back to the country. I worked as a horse riding instructor and a hiking guide. But after some time time I felt I needed to finally get my diploma. I returned to the city to finish my studies. At that time I also started to work at ScienceSoft. They offered me 10 times more than I was making as an instructor.

But soon I realized that big city life was not for me. I didn’t enjoy living in a rented apartment and eating supermarket food. My schedule was tight, I had little to no free time. I longed to have my own place. In Belarus, many people move to the country and start eco settlements. And it’s actually not a crazy idea, it’s quite rational.

Me now

I wanted to be away from a big city, and my wife wanted a horse. We put all the pieces of the puzzle together — moving to the country was the perfect solution. We started saving up money to buy a car and build a house. Our next step was to find a place to settle and like-minded people to join us.

Finding the place

We were looking for a place in the woods with enough pasture for the horses. We also hoped to have neighbors so there had to be some extra space. And the land had to be away from highways or any industrial facility. It turned out to be rather tricky to find a place that would match this description. Some options were not as ecologically clean as we wanted, others had documents problems. In Belarus, many villages are turned into non-residential areas as people move away be cities.

It took us several years to find a place. One day we saw an ad — a house in Eastern Belarus for sale. It just felt right. The house was located in a small village called Ulesie, two-hour drive away from Minsk. As many other villages, this one was dying out.

We came to Ulesie for the first time in February. It was quiet and snowy

The place was perfect — a lake nearby, woodlands for many miles around, wild grass fields. We met a neighbor, an elderly man, who told us we would fit in just fine.

Our settlement in spring

We bought a patch of land with an old house. The house itself was quite small but well-built. My initial plan was to repaint it and do a couple of fixes, but I got into the process and renovated the whole house.

Our house is built of logs, jute oakum and clay

We got all the paperwork done, packed our stuff and the cat and moved in. For the first couple of months we had to live in a tent inside the house — the renovation was still in progress. Then I built stables and bought five horses — our dream came true. It didn’t even cost us an arm and a leg — in the country everything is cheaper.

My workplace and workday

In the best-case scenario, I wake up around 5 or 6 am, do my programming job for about four hours and then work with the horses or fix something around the house. In the summer, I sometimes prefer to work on the computer in the afternoon, when it’s hot, and leave mornings and evenings for the housework.

In the summer, I like to work outside

My study in the attic

Usually, I work in my study in the attic. It’s very quiet here so I can concentrate.

View from my workplace

My internet router has a good coverage — about 12 acres around the house so I can work outside on the porch or even somewhere in the field.

Sometimes I even work like that

Even when I’m working in the stables or on the construction, I’m still available — my phone is with me at all times.

New neighbours and the infrastructure

There were some locals in our village, but we wanted to be surrounded by like-minded people. So we listed our settlement in a catalogue. That was the beginning of the eco settlement Ulesie.

The first neighbours arrived a year after we moved in. Now five families with kids live here

Most of our new neighbours have a business in a big city. I’m the only one who works from home. We are still settling but everyone has ideas on how to improve our village. We don’t come here just for the summer. For example, we have our own produce — berries and dried mushrooms.

The village is surrounded by woods that are full of wild berries and herbs like rosebay willowherb — we use it to make tea. We would like to take advantage of these resources — not only collect the berries and herbs for our own use but to have a small production. We want to build a dryer and sell them to eco shops in the city.

Life hack: plant gooseberry around apple trees. It keeps hares away

We live far away from any big city, but we are not isolated. In Belarus, medical care, postal and police service and food delivery are provided even in the middle of nowhere.

School. Our village is very small so it doesn’t have a school — a school bus takes kids to the nearest one. Our neighbours say it’s quite decent. Some drive their kids to school. Other kids are homeschooled but they still have some classes in the city.
Post. The postal service works like a dream — I just call them and they come to the village to deliver my post or get my package. It costs almost nothing.
Food delivery. A mobile store comes to the village every now and then. It has all the staple, basic food. For special cravings, we can always drive to the city.
Medical care. We have no problems with medical care. Our son was born here, and for the first several months after his birth a doctor would come every week. Then we got visits every month and now, when our son is 3.5, a doctor just visits occasionally. We begged the doctors not to come so often but they insisted — they have standards of care for children and the elderly.

Urgent care is also available. Once one of our neighbours got stung by wasps. The doctors arrived immediately and took care of him.

Summer camp for children

Growing up, I had everything city kids did not — horse rides, hiking and camping trips. As I was growing older, I realized that those things made me a person I am now. So I wanted other kids to have this experience. That is how I got an idea of a horse riding summer camp.

This summer we had the first visitors.

We taught kids how to ride horses

We also hiked in the Berezinsky national park — it’s not far away from Ulesie.

The atmosphere was very homie — we cooked for the kids, looked after them all together, had dinner at one big table. I hope we’ll do the camp regularly.

Time and money

I make quite good money even for Minsk — so it’s more than enough for a village. We don’t eat out in expensive restaurants and produce 40% of our food ourselves. So we mostly spend money on construction.

As our settlement is very new everyone is building something. We have a time bank — one day I help my neighbour, then he helps me. The equipment is also shared — recently we borrowed a tractor from our priest.

When it comes to community activities, we work together too. For example, everyone helped with building the infrastructure for the camp.

Some time ago we planted a community orchard — several hundreds trees. Later everyone will collect fruit.

Locals think we are freaks, but they don’t mind. Sometimes we ask them to help with construction — that’s extra money for them. This summer, we made hay together with the locals — many of them were ready to help.

Family life

Family life in the village is a real challenge — don’t say that I didn’t warn you. In the city, you don’t see the person you live with for most part of the day. If a problem comes up, it’s easy to hide away from it — in the office, restaurant or club. You have your own lives outside of your couple. But in the country, you’re together 24/7. So you have to learn how to cooperate and build a strong connection. It’s a kind of a test — if you cannot be with your husband or wife all the time, maybe that’s the wrong person.

P.S. We took over our village — there’s no land left. So we have plans to expand to the nearest one. Three families are already working on the land there. We want more people to join us — so if you’re interested, join our community in VK (https://vk.com/ulesie_rp).

Or just come by — I’ll teach you how to ride.

Chinese school holidays: shut up and take my money

Maria Yanchauskayte — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 07:53:55 +0000

by Anton Krotov, Market Researcher at Skyeng company.

Chinese students’ summer break is full of despair — it lasts only for a single month, August, and Chinese “Tiger Parents” are always eager to send their kids to as many summer schools and courses as possible. So, this period is all for work, not for fun. And from the side of Chinese EdTech companies, August is marvellous. But before getting there they must survive, perhaps, the most terrible month of the year — July.

In July a fierce competition between Chinese educational companies that provide K12 after-school services reaches to a totally different level — all big companies start to pump up the advertising budgets of their summer courses up to six-figure sums. For instance, last month each of three top K12 educational enterprises — TAL Education Group, Yuanfudao, and Zuoyebang — have been spending TEN MILLION RMB every day ONLY to promote their SUMMER COURSES (~US$1.5 mln per day). Other top K12 platforms — Zhangmen, 17Zuoye, Knowbox, VIPKID, NetEase Youdao, Fudao QQ and Genshuixue— have spent in total around 3–4 billion RMB (~US$42–52 mln) on similar advertising also in a single month.

In fact, all Chinese EdTech companies are willing to spend a lot of money on this advertising boom for at least one reason — everyone wants to take the largest share of the world’s largest K12 after-school market in its hottest period. This market consists of 59 million students whose parents are ready to pay big money to give their children a better education and more chances to compete for their future.

Source: https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Education/All-work-and-no-play-for-Chinese-kids-this-summer2

Live streaming platforms: unattainable dreams of education

Maria Yanchauskayte — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 15:17:26 +0000

by Anton Krotov, Market Researcher at Skyeng company.

I decided to cultivate a useful habit to write more about the EdTech market that I am daily working with. So, here it comes - my DEV.to blog where I will share all cool stories about education and the world around it.

My first short article is about educational services that struggle to enter the space of streaming services.

In the last five years, education has penetrated and firmly rooted on Youtube — today a lecture from TED or educational video from Vsauce can easily get millions of views while previously it was achievable only for musicians, funny kitties or memes. However, despite this successful conquest, educational content could barely get through the various streaming platforms (like Twitch and others) and currently it remains unnoticed by the general public of these services comparing to video games.

Yes, on Twitch you may find some channels where people do not stream their Fortnite or Dota 2 playthroughs but teach how to code or speak another language. But these channels lack followers and cannot compete with popular educational Youtube channels which can gather millions of subscribers. Here are a few most popular educational (more or less) channels that I could find on Twitch:

DevChatter — a guy, who streams C# coding lessons and has 3.5 thousand followers — https://www.twitch.tv/devchatter

CookingForNoobs — a girl, who streams how to cook various meals. She has 24.5 thousand followers (indeed, more people eat food than write code) — https://www.twitch.tv/cookingfornoobs

The_Widdler — a DJ-guy, who shows how to make electronic music. He got 8.5 thousand followers — https://www.twitch.tv/the_widdler

As you may see, all of them have a pretty modest number of subscribers.

Interestingly, but timid attempts to enter the world of streaming can be found even among Russian EdTech companies. For example, EnglishCraft company offers English lessons for kids through playing Minecraft. Unfortunately, I could not find any news about these guys and it seems like that this business model is pretty far from being robust and scalable.

Nonetheless, the first small step into the streaming space that could potentially be a giant leap for education was recently made by Duolingo — creators of famous green owl announced a partnership with 12 multilingual streamers on Twitch who will help their followers to practice languages while playing. In general, the idea to bring language learning on Twitch seems to be so obvious but there is no right business model for that yet. For now, who knows, maybe Duolingo will become the first company who will break the ice between education and streaming platforms.