Meet Irina: Software Engineer at TIER

Irina joined TIER more than 2 years ago and she works as a Senior Software Engineer in the OpsRaptors team. She told us about the projects she is involved in and the challenges she faces. Moreover, Irina shared a couple of recommendations on the time management and smart gadgets 🧐

Hello! Could you tell us about yourself? What is your background experience?

Hi, I’m Irina. Originally from Russia and already for almost 5 years I live in Berlin.

I started my career as a consultant in 2014 and worked on projects with different tech stacks like PHP/jQuery, Angular 1, Polymer and ended up with React. After such diversity over 1,5 years, I realised that I’d like to focus on one stack and the choice fell on React/Redux. Also, I was looking for a product company where it would be possible to focus on one project for a longer period of time.

TIER is my third startup I work for in Berlin. When I decided to join, one of the criteria was that my friends and I could use the product. At that time, we operated only in Vienna. I went there for a vacation and tried riding a scooter for the first time. That was amazing!

Now after more than two years of working here, I still enjoy seeing our customers riding scooters or mopeds on the street.

What are you working on in TIER? What is your role?

At TIER, I’m working on an internal fleet management tool that brings an overview of what’s going on in a city to our operation people and helps them to make decisions. At the moment I’m a team member of a domain team and also a lead of Frontend Herd in our department. The team name is OpsRaptors, it comes from Operations Raptors as we are on the operation side (OpsX department) and why Raptors – dinosaurs are cool! 🦖

What do you see as a daily routine, but for some reason, you can’t automate/delegate it?

Reading slack messages and emails.

Can you recall the biggest failure?

It happened a year ago. I shared .env file with my colleague via wormhole cli. I copied and renamed the file, but I forgot to delete it.

Later on, when I finished with the changes, I added everything to the stage and then committed and pushed. A few seconds later I saw exactly what was pushed to the remote branch. After that, I learned that it’s not possible to delete what was pushed to GitHub and rotated the keys. Eventually, I adapted a habit of always checking what’s going to be committed.

Book/blog recommendation

When I became a tech lead for the team I released how important it is to focus on the things that matter the most. And this struggle brought me back to looking for a new time management system or something like that.

I found answers in the book “Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management” by Mark Forster. The turning point for me was a closed list of to-dos. How does it work? Today you prepare a to-do list for tomorrow and tomorrow you can’t add anything else to it. New points should be added only to the new list for the day after tomorrow. It doesn’t mean that urgent matters never happen, but it helps to reduce the chaos of the day.

Name a couple of must-have skills to elevate you as a developer

Discipline and patience - with these two skills I think you can achieve many great things in the future and specifically in the IT field. It is extremely important to constantly learn new things and monitor the trends. These skills were also mentioned in Mark Foster’s book.

For me, one of the great examples is Aikido. I’m a part of Berlin’s Aikido Kokikai dojo and when I joined I couldn’t make rolls at all. I tried to perform them every class and finally one day after the Christmas holidays I did it.

Why do you use smart home systems or smart gadgets?

At home, I don’t have any smart systems but I’m a fan of Oura ring if it can be counted as a smart gadget. It brought me some numbers behind sleep quality and more awareness of different factors that affect sleep quality. Is it always accurate? Not really, sometimes it shows that I’m in perfect condition and had a great sleep, but I don’t feel this way at all. But it’s still quite accurate most of the time.