Despite being at work all the time, and being constantly busy, I am still a human. I am social. I have a life, family, and friends. I have thoughts and experiences. Once in a while I share them, and when I do, I do so in this category. If you don’t know me personally, chances are you’ll find posts in this category particularly boring.
My good friend Slava Dyrdine has finally published his first book of drawings. You can buy a paperback edition from Amazon for only $15. If you are into art and moody things, you’ll love having a copy of this at home or in the office. It also goes well as a present.
Today is my third birthday as the Qobo CTO. Here are the summary posts for the first and second years, if you are interested.
I haven’t had a boring year at Qobo yet. And this last one was the most eventful and interesting, both business and technology wise. Let’s have a quick look at the business side of things first.
Since last August, here are some of the things that happened:
Now let’s have a look at technology a bit more. Last year I mentioned Qobrix, but I could give you any more details. Today, Qobrix is a real thing. It’s our own platform for building business applications rapidly. We developed it to a very usable state, and built quite a few applications with it, anything from custom processes, Intranets, and all the way up to the CRMs. The platform is being actively developed and is maturing every day. We have also started building a new website that provides plenty of information for it.
Big chunks of our development effort are being released as Open Source software – have a look at our ever-growing GitHub profile. We have also contributed to a number of Open Source projects in both CakePHP and WordPress ecosystems.
We are also getting much better at this whole cloud computing thing. Our knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is growing and improving. We have more servers now, use more services, and planning to expand even further.
Overall, as you can see, this was quite an intensive year, and it doesn’t look like things are slowing down. Quite the opposite. After three years at Qobo, I have to say that this is hands down the best job I ever had (and I had some pretty amazing jobs in the last couple of decades). I’m learning a lot every single day. I see the impact of my effort on the company as a whole, on the team, and on our clients. And I am still humbled by the expertise and virtues of people around me.
I’d like to thank everybody around me for all the wisdom, tips, hard work, and joyful moments during the last year. I’ll be raising my glass tonight for many more years like this one. Cheers!
As some of you already know, I’ve spent most of this week in London, UK. My first and only time in London was back in 2009, when I went there for a PHP conference (see this post, and this post).
This trip was very different. I stayed longer than the last time. I was mostly for business. I had much less time to explore the city as a tourist. So I thought I’d write it up, in case I case I need to remember some of it later.
I came across this awesome collection of photographs of my home town – Togliatti, Russia (June 2017). By a lucky coincidence, even the house that I grew up until I moved to Cyprus got into one of the pictures. It’s the building to the right of the tall building in the center-right of the above image. Second floor, left window is the kitchen of the apartment where I spent almost 18 years.
The building in the center-bottom is the kindergarden, which I went to. And the large building on the left is the school, where I studied for the first three years.
Things look quite different from how I remember them, cause it’s been years since I’ve been there (last time in 2006). The neighborhood changed, memories faded, and the high altitude perspective is not how I’ve used to look at it.
The question of the phone call etiquette has been coming up more and more often recently. Is it polite to call without a prior message or agreement? What time should one call? What’s the decision point for opting for the phone call versus some other communication channel? These, and many other questions are popping up frequently.
I came across a nice blog post – “Why I don’t answer most phone calls” – which discusses some of the reasons why this particular person doesn’t answer phone calls. It’s a good quick read, but here is a summary:
And I do agree with these points. Call do interrupt and are rarely timed well. Most people suck at communications, so calls drag on forever. Whenever something is discussed or decided, there is no trace of it. And my memory is horrible.
However, I do still answer phone calls. But my personal expectation is that a call is:
If it’s none of the above, I tend to get irritated and think much lesser of the world around me in general, and a person calling me in particular. :)