Sergey Isaev

Background

About Sergey Isaev

I have been working in software development for over 15 years. I started with desktop development on.NET, but for the last 8 years, I have been doing web development (mainly back-end, but I also tried myself in related areas, from front-end to SRE/DevOps). My main and most interesting experience so far has been with Smartcat. With this project, I went from a prototype running on an old server next room to a highly loaded distributed cloud system with hundreds of thousands of users. Along the way, I had to solve a variety of technical problems- Write testable and maintainable code, improve testing culture and code reviews - Migrate terabytes of data, design sharding-friendly database schemas - Deal with all sorts of eventual consistency and inter-service communication problems - Untangle deadlocks, fix race conditions, write high-performant multi-threaded code - Scale the system under load from fully manual operations to autoscale in k8s - Design and evolve system architecture to allow multiple development teams to work independently Although for a long time I thought that I like working with computers more than with people, over time I realized that I like building development teams as much as I like solving complex technical problems. As a team leader, I built teams from scratch and developed existing ones, built hiring and onboarding processes, found and eliminated bottlenecks in processes, helped developers grow professionally, and made the teams' work transparent to the business.