Become a Better Developer by Surrounding Yourself with the Right People
Peťo Hraška found his passion in the math competition called Riešky. He studied at the faculty of mathematics, physics and informatics at the Comenius University. While studying, he joined the Slovak startup, Slido, as a Frontend developer. Slido is a technology company building a world-class audience interaction platform, which has helped to make over 600.000 events worldwide more interactive.
Peťo, how did you get into programming?
There are quite a few programmers in my family — starting with my father and cousin, who inspired me a lot. So when I was eleven, I joined a coding club at my high school, Gamča, where we had a great teacher and were learning to code in C++. I was 4 years younger than any of the kids there, and even though I didn’t understand much, I wanted to do all the cool stuff. At home, I once saw my father create a website, and I thought: “Wow, I want to have a website as well!” I expected my father to do it for me, but he told me: “You need to do it yourself.” Those were my starts.
You started working at Slido while you were still studying at University. How did you get there?
I had already known about Slido for some time. I had used it during a few discussions at Nexteria, and really loved it. These, thanks to Slido, were much more useful than any other discussion we had. When my friend approached me and told me that Slido was hiring, I decided to give it a try. The interesting thing is, that I was not hired as a developer. At my previous job, I didn’t like how the programming was done. We were coding in PHP and had an overcomplicated process. At that time, I thought that programming was not for me, so I actually joined Slido as some kind of a Growth Specialist — combining HTML, CSS stuff with some A/B testing, to improve our website. I was even considering quitting programming, but then at Slido, I met with great developers from whom I learned so much — plus they showed me that programming can actually be quite fun. So, because of the great people, unique culture and way of working, I started developing some things here and there, and it slowly came to me that programming can be cool and was the thing for me. Now, I can see that it was a great decision.
You joined Slido almost four years ago. What projects have you had a chance to work on?
Back then, the Slido team was so small, that our homepage was actually managed by our CTO, which is quite funny. So when I joined Slido,I took responsibility of our homepage for some time. After a year, I started working on our Slido App and Wall. Those were very exciting times, as these are the applications that all of our users see, and interact with.
Three projects from the last couple of months that come to my mind, are Custom themes, so that people can come and choose any color they want, and the Slido Wall will adapt to look perfect. The 2nd one, is our Spotify integration, which is the result of a winning hackathon experiment. The 3rd one, is Quizzes, as our most recent addition to the Slido product.
At some point, I was actually thinking of quitting my studies and working only at Slido, but our CEO, Peťo, advised me to finish my studies. It was the right thing to do. Still, I feel that gaining experience outside school is super useful.
What are you developing right now? Which technologies are you using?
We are currently looking on Image Polls, so our users can interact not only with pure text, but also with pictures. I’m mostly working on Frontend, where we mainly use React and Angular, and some pieces of AngularJS, but we are slowly getting rid of them. I also do some smaller tasks on Backend, where we are using NodeJS.
What do you like most about your work? Do you have a favorite task?
I love working on projects and features with which our users can directly interact. For example, new types of Polls, which participants can experience directly. Making them visually appealing. I love it when users are blown away by the amazing ideas and things moving on the screen. From the development perspective, I really enjoy the fact that before we start a larger task, we have a design sprint. For a couple of days, we close ourselves in a conference room and discuss and ideate some complicated tasks and features. The Quizzes are a good example, as we were closed in for a week to think about all the little pieces to put together, and to find the right idea on how to build them.
We have a great product team in place, where we are willing to help, and can rely on each other.
What plans do you have at Slido for the future? What is in your future roadmap?
The Image and Ranking Poll should be the focus for the next couple of weeks. That’s a huge thing. Then, there are all the other ways of how to interact with Slido during live presentations. In the future, we want to rethink how we display information to the participants. We would like to re-design the Slido Wall, to make it even more attractive and interactive. We still have a long way to go 🙂
Currently, we are looking to strengthen our Engineering team, to help us with some of the technical challenges. You can check out our opportunities here.
It has been a while since you were at university. How do you learn new things and improve yourself as a developer?
There is always huge room for improvement when we are implementing new things that haven’t been done before. We have some time to study what the best approach is, and discuss it with the rest of the team. When someone from the team finds something interesting that they are eager to share, this acts as a learning tool for others, and can be demonstrated either via a link, or some small presentation on something cool. So it is great to be surrounded by people from whom you can learn. There is always an opportunity to learn something new and improve oneself.
What would you recommend to people who are just getting started in programming?
The most important thing is, make sure you enjoy it! If you do, you can set huge goals. But my advice is, to start small and progress with little steps. If you work on things you enjoy doing, you will be willing to invest more time and energy on them, rather than on those tasks which you don’t care about, but have been told to do. So do something you like, do it in small steps and enjoy the journey.
How do you see the developer ecosystem in Slovakia?
Slovakia is a small country, so by design, we do not have the same quantity of great developers as some other countries do. However, the quality of developers is great. People from this region around Slovakia have always been good in physics, math and coding, which are very related fields, so it is also probably a historical thing. Slovak developers rank high in many prestigious coding competitions, and there are a few universities producing amazing developers. Some teachers are actually receiving offers from top Silicon Valley companies, but reject them. Instead, they continue to teach the actual coding to students, which is great. I have a number of friends working in those top tech companies, but I think you don’t need to relocate elsewhere to be able to work on a world-class team. We already have some really cool companies here in Slovakia.
What are your technology predictions for this new decade?
JavaScript surprised us in the last couple of years — for example, using it on the backend. I feel that in the next few years, this technology will dominate until something new comes up, but seeing JavaScript in products like smartwatches is a thing right now. Not many people expected this some years ago. In the grand scheme of things, we will talk more about space, and going to Mars, self-driving cars, better usage of Machine learning, and AI. Those will be the next technological challenges.
How does Slido fit into this?
Slido will definitely benefit from the usage of Machine learning and AI algorithms; for example by grouping participants with similar interests and letting them contact each other, or intelligently detecting questions that have already been asked. This will help us to improve the Slido product for our users even more. And as Slido is helping others to improve their internal communication, we should actually help those other companies to get to Mars in a better way, or sooner. That’s where I see the role of Slido.
