Teamlead diary: end of chapter

Note: originally written in Russian

Almost five years after the post in this series (Teamleader diary: The Beginning) and no posts in this diary since I’m writing the second and probably the last one in it. I happen to become a devrel (DevRel/Developer Advocate/Developer Evangelist any variation of the title is ok, I don’t mind any of those).

Ostrovok has changed a lot in 5 years, the startup spirit is slowly disappearing. And some would say it’s been gone for a long time. Along with this, the company has grown a lot, there are a lot of new and interesting challenges. And a unique opportunity to participate in the process of scaling services and infrastructure.

During all this time, my desire to learn new technologies has never faded. I have never been able to fully switch to managing processes and people, my hands were always itching to do something else and I did not stop myself. And this approach doesn’t scale.

It started with me and a couple of backenders and a frontender. There were periods when there were more than 20 people in the team, out of which 4 frontenders with their teamlead, 8 QA with their teamlead and the rest were backenders with me. Now QA is not part of development team and the number of developers is approaching 20 again.

Speaking of numbers. I remember an article in which a googler wrote in numbers what happened to him at Google with numbers. I’m going to try to do the same thing, only for the last 5 years at Ostrovok. Some of the numbers will be approximate, but they will at least tell you the order and scope of events:

• conducted about 200 interviews (about half to my team, the rest to others)
• hired 11 backenders
• fired 1 backender and 1 frontender (I’m not proud of it, but it was an interesting experience)
• the company changed 3 offices
• if I count the transition to remote work as a change of office, I changed 4 offices
• 2 CTOs changed
• 4 of my managers changed
• our team changed 1 task tracker (first Redmine, then YouTrack)
• made about 10 thousand commits to different repositories, internal and public.
• wrote dozens of pages of documentation in Confluence
• ruined live production environment about 10 times with total losses for the company in tens of thousands of dollars (it would be interesting to calculate how much I earned 🙂)
• wrote 1 article on habr (Не ORM-ом единым)
• Changed 4 laptops: macbook pro 13 2015, macbook pro 13 2017, macbook pro 15 2015, macbook air 13 M1 (all laptop replacements were upgrades, never once poured coffee on the laptop 🙂)
• used all versions of python from 3.6 to 3.12
• used all versions of Django from 2.X to 5.X
• changed 3 dependency management systems (pipenv, pip-tools, poetry) in a project with dozens of dependencies
• as a consequence, completely rewrote Dockerfile in the same project 3 times
• went through a complete reformatting of the project when black came out, which complicated git blame usage for a long time.

I guess I can remember more facts and statistics, but these are the most memorable.

What will happen next? Together with marketing team, I am going to evolve the developer community around Ostrovok.ru and Ostrovok.Tech. I will help organizing meetups, participate in conferences, record podcasts, hold hackathons and CTFs (inside the company for now, but who knows), and write more articles. This is the beginning of a new round of realization of my passion for learning new technologies and automating everything.