When did you start working with us?
01.06.2013
What was your first position at Clearcode?
Python Developer.
What is your current position at Clearcode?
Tech Lead.
For some time you were acting as Project Manager in your team, but you quit it for the role of Tech Lead. Where did this decision come from?
When resigning, the previous Project Manager suggested two candidates for his position – myself and our previous Tech Lead. The former wasn’t interested in taking the position and I decided it was worth trying. I even managed to bring the situation in the team and our relations with the client under control. Still, the technical side was a draw for me. It was more attractive for me than the responsibilities of Project Manager. In the meantime, my son was born. I came to a conclusion that I want to focus only on the technical side of my work and have more energy when I come back home.
Against what challenges do you go up every day at work?
I help the team with making decisions. I believe that making a decision for somebody is not a good idea, but providing help with coming to some conclusions or reaching the final decision is the direction, which lest the team and its members grow. However, the biggest challenge in my job is starting work early and leaving the office in reasonable hours to come back home to kids. (laugh)
You are the co-author of one of the most unusual Pet Projects in the company – you are working on software and hardware which controls a model train. What, in your opinion, is the value behind Pet Projects and why do you decide to use it in this specific way?
Pet Projects are most of all a springboard for what I’m currently doing. It is nice to get out of your comfort zone and learn something new. I think it’s important to get a break and not even do a specific project, but to sit down and read some technical stuff. It can be also something connected with a project we are currently developing – sometimes there is not enough time during sprint to read documentation without interruptions. It could be time for reading documentation and finding some trivia.
The whole idea for the model train is that we want to reconstruct with our own fair hands the signal decoders going to model trains via tracks, and put particular trains in action or trigger other actions like switching on the lights, making a sound.
I have never really fully grasped electronics, and consider it still a bit of witchcraft, but it’s nice we’ve already encouraged a few people to take part in this project. And the initial integration also involves the project, so the train starts each time during deploy. Since the trains we have are analog, we also have plans to make them more digital. It requires from us some knowledge about communication standards, existing solutions and a bit of reverse engineering. Thanks to that, we will be able to put a couple of trains on tracks in different directions and with different speeds. There is also a plan to make a main railway running around the office, branching to each room. There could be, for example, a birthday train distributing candies. Like in the bar in Prague, where a model train distributes pints of beer around the pub.
