Andrei Liotenko
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Andrei Liotenko. I’m a web-developer & designer from red {code}studio (Vitebsk, Belarus). I work remotely from home.
What is your day like?
9.30 I wake up, drink a glass of water, feed and comb my cat, then do some yoga practice, turn on macbook and start working. When you start working immediately after waking up — it’s really easy to concentrate on tasks. Otherwise you will procrastinate by reading news, emails, twitter, etc. all day long…
9.50 I get my morning tea with some cakes or muffins and continue to work.
10.30 Finally breakfast! Usually it is one or two soft-boiled eggs, tea/lemon juice, bread with butter, and some ham.
11.40 If nothing is burning and nobody is calling me by phone or Skype (I haven’t read my e-mails yet) I continue to work on current tasks by their priority.
13.00–13.30 Before lunch I usually walk around the city or ride a bike in the nearby parks. Sometimes little shopping. It helps me clear my mind and keep my body fit.
14.00 Lunch! It can be everything: meat, chicken, fish, Greek salad.
14.30 A little nap, that increases productivity a lot.
15.00 Continue to work. Now I can read emails, communicate with my team and create a new task, or change the old tasks’ priority. I use a very simple system with a stack of big tasks and a collection of small tasks/corrections which I write on special colour sheets. I think if you try to control small tasks very strictly, you can waste your time for nothing, so, I just take small notes on paper and strike them out one by one.
16.00/17.00 Time to rest.
23.00 A little more work or something new — languages, frameworks, or just reading new books.
00.00 Yoga time!
01.00 Going to sleep
What instruments or software help you in your life and work?
13-inch macbook pro with OS X. Really love linux but it still can’t work well with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. I think OS X is a good standard for developers, and mostly all dev tools work out of the box on it. Sometimes I disconnect monitors and lie on the couch with a laptop — it helps to relax my body.
27" Crossover monitor (same matrix as in apple 27 inch — 2560x1440 displays but costs ~30% of apple price) with my macbook + 22 inch display.
iPad Air 2 — For reading PDFs and browsing the internet & social media. iPad is the best way to read pdf books with code listings!
Old Samsung Galaxy S Advance — since apple disappoints me with the new iPhones, and I am thinking about trying some Xiaomi phones.
Amazon Kindle touch — for reading tons of books, it’s my best friend on trips and vocation.
Vim — the best editor with cool key layouts and great plugins! I use it in MacVim and in terminal. Vim is fast, extendable and it is not an IDE)
Google Chrome dev tools — best browser for developer. Sometimes I use dev tools in other browsers, but mostly in chrome.
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator — great tools for ui mockups and img editing.
Google Docs — our team use it to manage big tasks and hold some meta-data. Mostly we use google spreadsheets and a little bit of documents for other tasks.
Gmail — I use web interface and sometimes Mail.app to send messages.
