interview with Kirill Tribunsky, head of the frontend development guild MoegoSklad
Kirill Tribunsky plays several roles in the company: head of the frontend development guild and leading frontend developer of the MoegoSklad Design Architecture team.
In this interview we talked about the following:
how he switched from the backend to the frontend and ended up at MyWarehouse;
which is simpler: frontend or backend;
how the frontend development guild is organized in MyWarehouse;
where to start learning frontend development;
where a front-end developer can grow;
what does a frontend developer do at MoemSklad;
technology stack;
How does the adaptation of newcomers to the guild take place?
and other points.
— Kirill, how did you come to IT? Tell us about your background.
— I have a higher specialized education, I am a mathematician, a systems programmer. In my second year, I started working part-time as a system administrator and gradually immersed myself in IT. Then I worked as a manual tester for some time. After university, I got a job at a small outsourcing company as a backend developer. I wrote in Java for a couple of years, and then switched to the frontend.
— Why did you switch to frontend?
— It so happened that on the project where I was working at the time, the only person who was doing frontend quit. And I, as the youngest, was simply given this task. I tried it, and I really liked it. I realized that I wanted to develop further in this direction.
— What exactly did you like?
— What attracted me most was that you can see the results of your changes almost immediately and make edits within a couple of minutes. In the backend, everything works differently: you code something, and you don’t have the opportunity to immediately check how everything works. You have to wait for some time and hope that you correctly wrote the abstract picture you collected in your head in the form of code. That’s why I like working in real time more.
— There is an opinion that frontend development is easier than backend. What do you think about this?
— It used to be like that. When I got into frontend, everyone used the jQuery library as a single standard. Now the situation has changed dramatically. Frontend development is actively evolving: new frameworks, tools, and technologies appear. The entry threshold into frontend is growing every year, so specialists must always be aware of current opportunities and be able to apply them in practice.
— Tell me how you ended up at MyWarehouse.
— I had heard about MoySklad even before I came here. At that time, a popular IT Twitter blogger worked for the company, who spoke well of it. So when MoySklad's HR called me, I was very interested.
I came to MoySklad in 2021, straight into a management position. There were no guilds back then, but there was an idea to start implementing frontend culture and React. And I began to gradually build the work: recruit guys, develop architecture, describe processes.
— Guild and team – what's the difference?
— The guild is a horizontal association of front-end developers from different teams. The guild does not directly influence the team, does not participate in the formation of the roadmap, goals. The main role of the guild is the dissemination of the front-end culture, the exchange of knowledge and practices, and the development of developers.
A team is responsible for a specific area of work. For example, I am part of a design architecture team that is responsible for redesigning web service interfaces, global navigation, and the overall layout of the product interfaces.
— Tell us more about how the frontend development guild is structured? What activities do you have?
— There are 19 people in the guild now. I manage processes, train people, and hire senior specialists and leads. At first, I interviewed all grades, then taught the guys who wanted to try to do it. Now I only come to interview middles if I need to evaluate software. There are 9 interviewers in the guild: some do hiring, and some do training. We replace each other if necessary.
The guild also includes groups of developers who actively participate in architectural issues and code reviews. We call them core.
Each member of the guild can contribute to the development of common products. For example, the guild currently manages a number of internal tools and libraries that are used in projects, including the component base. It belongs to all front-end developers of the company, and anyone can contribute to it. The global goal of the guild is to implement React in the project.
The guild has various events. Every two weeks we have a technical sync — a meeting where we discuss accumulated issues. All front-enders of the company from different teams are present. Everyone can share their pain, ask questions, bring a new idea. We update the situation with the front-end in the company and try to quickly come up with a solution that we will implement later. Once a month we hold meetups where anyone can speak on any topic related to the front-end.
Within the guild, we also conduct annual reviews: we evaluate the achievements of employees, revise grades and salaries.
We also practice cross-team code review. Everyone can invite other front-enders to look at their code and check it.
— What does a frontend developer do at MoemSklad?
— Globally, a front-end developer develops a UI in accordance with the layouts prepared by designers. Then, depending on the product they are working with, the specifics begin. For example, front-end developers who work with MoiSklad, our monolith, encounter Google Web Toolkit. We are gradually replacing this technology with React. There are front-end developers who do not work with the monolith. For example, the guys from the Retail department develop electronic cash registers using Electron.
— What technology stack do you use?
— Our tech stack includes React, TypeScript, Webpack. The projects also use Redux Toolkit and Effector, and for styles — Linaria or cssModules.
— What hard skills does a MoeSklad front-end developer need?
— The main thing is to write confidently using React. A mandatory part of our interviews is independent live coding. We give the candidate a product that is slightly unfinished and ask them to polish it up. At the same time, the person should not just apply practices that they saw somewhere, but clearly understand what they are writing at the moment and why.
— Are soft skills important?
— I think that software is more important than technical skills, because it is harder to improve them. At MoemSklad, a front-end developer interacts with different specialists: analysts, designers, testers, and back-end developers. You can't do without the ability to work in a team.
Usually, already at the technical interview we see who will definitely fit into the team and the guild. We have a group of charged guys who are passionate about the programming process itself, so we are looking for people with similar spirits.
— How does the adaptation of newcomers to the guild go?
— We have a well-established onboarding process for new employees. For the probationary period, we assign a mentor from among the front-end developers. You can contact him with any questions: from work tasks to organizational issues like “how to order equipment” or “who to write to about sick leave”. The mentor’s job is to generate feedback about the employee and convey it to the head of the guild.
Periodically during the probationary period, we get together and discuss how the adaptation is going, whether there are any problems, whether help is needed.
We try to integrate a person into the team and into the work process itself as quickly as possible, so that within a month he can work with 100% dedication and feel as comfortable as possible.
— Where to start learning front-end development?
— I would advise learning the base first. Now most developers write using TypeScript and do not learn JavaScript at all, believing that they do not need it. But nevertheless, JavaScript is a language that runs in browsers and is used in many places. If a person learns to use React or other trendy libraries and does not build a base, he will not have flexibility in terms of using technologies. Knowing the base, you can look at the problem from the outside and quite easily come up with a new solution to a non-standard task that cannot be googled. During my work, I often encountered situations when people believe that the task is unrealistic. But in fact, more than 99% of what is invented for projects is absolutely achievable. It just requires fundamental knowledge.
— Where can a front-end developer grow?
— There are several branches of development. If a front-end developer is only interested in code, he can grow to become an architect or a tech lead. This role requires extensive experience in solving problems, being well-versed, and knowledge of various patterns and JavaScript features. If you want to develop towards management, you can become a team leader and then grow to become the head of a guild. All of the above growth options are possible in MyWarehouse.
— Tell us about your most interesting project at MyWarehouse?
— We have a micro-frontend architecture built in our UI, which I built from scratch. I needed to integrate it into the existing UI written in Google Web Toolkit, set up all the processes related to the release, including the build. There was no generally accepted solution to this problem, it was impossible to get into Google and look at the solution. I had to come up with it myself. It was a painstaking, but very interesting project.
— What can distract you from work and how do you deal with it?
— Context switching is distracting. This mode is very exhausting: you can be tired during the day, but you can’t really do anything, because you’re doing a little bit of different tasks. If I’ve taken on a feature or am in a meeting, I try not to be distracted by messages, including work chats. This helps me be as involved as possible in solving a specific issue.
— What profession would you have chosen if you hadn’t become a front-end developer?
— Once I washed a car at a car wash and got a lot of pleasure from it. But seriously, I would do music. I have been playing different instruments since childhood: guitar, bass guitar, drums, keyboards. Now I have a mini-studio at home, where I write music in my free time.
— Name your favorite music bands, movies or YouTube channels.
— I listen to a wide variety of music, from oldies like Green Day to modern artists like Scriptonite.
Favorite movies: The Green Mile, Forrest Gump and Back to the Future.
On YouTube I mostly watch popular science. Right now I like the channels Veritasium, Vsauce, and translations by Vert Dider.
— Are there any people or characters you admire?
— I like Hank Rearden, the character from the book “Atlas Shrugged”. He is a man who loves his work and works for the pleasure of the process itself, and not for profit.
— What advice would you give to someone who wants to try themselves in IT but has doubts?
— The best way to understand whether you can work in IT is to take it and try it. Start figuring it out on your own, look for information, write the simplest program. If it works, and you understand that the coding process itself captivates you, then it’s yours.
Feel free to ask questions in the comments, Kirill will answer them for you. Subscribe to our tg-channel: there we post vacancies, write about the company, processes, employees and sometimes post cats.
