Denis Lebedev

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Denis Lebedev. I’m currently living in London and working at SwiftGift. My current role is a mix of iOS Developer / development lead.

What is your day like?

7.00 I wake up. Recently I’ve discovered that Smart Alarm of cheap MyFit band works really well for me, so I am able to get up without the annoying alarm sound. I’m constantly fighting with the urge to read all social feeds immediately, so I’ve started learning world capitals and flags (or new English words) using Anki cards on my phone instead.

7.20 Breakfast. Another thing I’m obsessed with is automation of everyday choices. Most of the time my breakfast would be 5 fried eggs (with yolk, of course) or a milk protein shake.

8.00 Gym time! For the last 4 years I’ve been doing it before my workday: the reason for that is dead simple: I would have more reasons to skip gym session if I went after work: I’m tired, I want to stay late at the office, etc.

9.30 I arrive in the office and try to complete as much as possible of my daily non-related to work TODO list. For example, today I had stuff like “finish this post” and “call national insurance” on this list.

10.00 I check my personal and work inbox for the first time. Usually it looks like I’m simply deleting all incoming emails (and it’s true). I perform an action on every email (leaving comment in the ticket, delegating it as a task, etc.) and delete everything else, I also unusubscribe from every email which I think is useless. Then I switch off Mail app. Then I start with the development tasks I carefully prepared the night before.

12.00 Short standup with our remote team members. I write down every request I get to schedule and complete it later.

12.20 I schedule another block of time to work without distraction. Options are:

• schedule a time slot in the calendar and invite all relevant team members
• put on the headphones and write down every incoming request in the form of tickets / todo items

14.00 Lunch time. For some reason I prefer to do it alone combining it with watching some tech talks. 1.5 playback speed really helps here.

14.30 Time to process all the stuff I’ve got from the team. I check emails again and perform pending tasks from my teammates.

16.00 It’s time to make a pull-request from the code I’ve produced today. Even though I’m solely responsible for iOS code base, every meaningful chunk of code goes through PR workflow:

• PR is created
• it is proof-read following my personal checklist
• updates are commited: you will be surprised how much of wrong stuff you can discover reading your own code
• I merge pull-request if tests pass on CI

17.30 Workday is over. I leave hints for future me in the form of todos/notes explaining where I should start my work tomorrow. Then I dedicate one hour or so to reading a technical book or skimming any of the starred github repositories, often making small contributions along the way .

18.30 I usually walk home, it takes approximately 40 minutes.

19.30 Back home. I really like to spend my evenings reading something or playing games, but my lovely wife convinces me to go outside together and explore new London areas.

21.00 Dinner, usually it is a pretty light meal consisting of salad and meat / eggs.

23.30 Even though I’m not exhausted and could easily be awake till 2–3 am I go to bed. I believe that healthy sleep is essential on the long run, and staying late even when it seems important is actually not that important. From my experience almost everything can wait until the next morning.

What instruments or software help you in your life and work?

I’m bound to Macs since I’m an iOS Developer, however I’m using Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 as my main phone. My software setup is pretty ordinary.

3 main apps I use are:

• Todoist with Premium subscription for my todos, reminders and future plans
• Nvalt (instead of Evernote) for keeping my small plain-text knowledge base: every snippet of text which I consider important goes there with my short comments. For example, I’ve read a lot of essays on OOD and have key thoughts distilled in my OOD note:
  “The point of inheritance is to take advantage of polymorphic behaviour NOT to reuse code, and people miss that, they see inheritance as a cheap way to add behavior to a class”
• Default Mail client (honestly I have no idea why people want to use something else and mess with all those rules and labels: if you check your inbox ocassionally and delete every email it does not matter).