Kir Shatrov
Who are you and what do you do?
I’m Kir Shatrov, software developer, traveller and a conference speaker. I’m currently based in Ottawa, the capital of Canada where the Shopify HQ is located.
At Shopify, I work on the Rails infrastructure and developer tools. We have hundreds of developers at the company, and the responsibility of my team is to provide them with the best developer tools.
While being a nomad for four years I’ve managed to travel to more than 25 countries, leading at the same time a team of remote developers at Evil Martians. But at some point, I realized that although it is awesome to be a nomad, sometimes you want to settle in one place for more than a month, get a comfortable desk with a large display. In 2016, I started working full-time from the office to experience what it was like.
What is your day like?
08:00. I wake up, take a shower and go straight to the office to get some breakfast. Ottawa is a small town, and it takes 15 minutes on foot from my house to the office.
09:00. It’s Tuesday which means it’s a bagel day!
09:30. I check my inbox and read feedback about my code. Morning is the best time to merge and deploy code changes because I’ll have the rest of the day to ensure that my code doesn’t break the platform.
11:30. At the weekly team meeting we discuss what issues we had during the week and how we can fix them. We also give a status update on current projects we are working on. Though there are more than a thousand employees at Shopify, my team is rather small (8 people) and it feels cozy there.
12:00. It’s lunch time. When I was a nomad, I usually had lunch later, around 2pm. But in the Western world lunch is always at noon and I had to get used to it.
12:40. I get back from the lunch, get coffee not to feel asleep and start working on the hard parts of the code. Sometimes that involves going around the office to discuss architecture with another team.
14:00 I have another meeting with a team lead to discuss my project’s progress.
16:00 Everyone including me stops deploying changes to production to have the evening with family instead of fixing some critical issues.
17:00 I go home and rest with a book in the backyard.
18:30 I fire up the BBQ to grill some meat. For dinner I have a steak with vegetables and a bit of wine. I enjoy cooking, and it helps me to get away from thinking about computers and technologies.
21:00. I write a new conference talk proposal that I’ll submit to a couple of conferences. The topic usually involves the technology that I’ve been working on lately, or it may be an open source or a work-related project.
22:30. Watch TV series before the bedtime.
What instruments or software help you in your life and work?
I use OS X and MacBook Pro Retina 13'’ both at home and at work, but my dream setup would be a ThinkPad series laptop because for the last couple of years the quality of MacBooks has decreased. For instance, my current laptop is only one-year-old but I’ve already had to deal with Apple service twice.
Last year I switched to Vim + Tmux. Now I enjoy the terminal experience and I only need to keep the browser open to check my mail and manage Github Pull requests and issues.
I enjoy reading books on Kindle Paperwhite because it provides an isolated experience of reading. On the mobile or tablet, it’s easy to get distracted from reading when you get a notification or a new message.
After I lost my iPhone 5 while having rest in Vondelpark in Amsterdam, I decided to try Nexus 6, my first Android device. Losing iPhone was a big loss since I’d used it for 3 years and I’d been completely fine with it. But so far I’m satisfied with Nexus 6 and it has everything I’d need.
