Hi, I’m Sergei. Sometimes I don’t fit into 280 symbols. Very rarely sometimes.
I’m into being useful, so most of my post are how I either made something or helped improving something in someone else’s project. When neither is the case, it’s probably me written a post on a topic to give links to what I think on a thing instead of writing it from scratch.
I make Within Means on weekends. I also made boring-tomorrow, bttt, dict-to-flashcard.
CV
My professional interests revolve around inclusivity, infrastructure, and improving workplace experience through processes and tools.
Inclusivity to me is about allowing more people use products. Means to the end vary:
- integrate with more services,
- run a product in more countries,
- be a source of integration for more businesses,
- keep a website fast, responsive and accessible,
- promote better UX,
- format money correctly.
This might sound broad but each of them has a personal reason. I have a protanomaly which means I see red color as black when I’m tired and barely recognise any numbers in the Ishihara test. I live in a country without good banks or marketplaces, and can’t send money to parents because of where they live. The locale of this country is not very popular on the Internet either, up to a point I submitted a bug report to Unicode CLDR.
There was a time when I used cheap hardware on limited unstable Internet. I’m sure many people are still like that. They should still be able to have nice things.
Infrastructure is a foundation that users don’t think about when it works and can be an endless source of headaches if not.
Internet infrastructure is many things, it lets you open websites to payments, update software, synchronize and backup anything. When the user is a developer, there are queues and databases and search and CI and whatnot. I believe there are still too many things re-implemented in each and every app that could be infrastructure. At the same time, you should be fine running your own copy of that infra in almost all cases. Exceptions are things like money transfers or logistics that significantly benefit customers from being everywhere.
It’s also cool to work on e.g. heating or water supply or sewage or railways or – you get it – just because how important it is.
Workplace experience is something of a by-product of working in teams.
People who crunch work worse than those who don’t, and there are a whole bunch of issues with health, nerves, family and social life when you work too much.
When the hours are sorted the 9-5 shouldn’t be hours people hate in their lives. Things causing fires and firefighting should be tweaked until they don’t, things that make people wait for a computer and each other reorganized and optimized. There should be reasons and mental capacity to be kind to each other. Means to the end, again, vary, but it’s a very satisfying job.
Sometimes I change jobs. If that’s the case, here is my CV. You can also schedule a meeting with me at cal.com/smagin.