Full Stack and True Black: Interview with 2022 Noonies Nominee Alexey Shepelev

Howdy Hackers!

I’m Alexey Shepelev and I’m the Full Stack Software Engineer at Altoros

First off, I’d like to express my gratitude to the staff, and all other beautiful humans of HackerNoon, for nominating me for a 2022 Noonies award!

I’ve been nominated for the following categories and if you think my writing offers good value, please take some time to check out these award pages and vote for me:

1. CODING GURU OF 2022

2. HackerNoon Contributor of the Year AUTHENTICATION

3. HackerNoon Contributor of the Year INFRASTRUCTURE

4. HackerNoon Contributor of the Year HTML

5. HackerNoon Contributor of the Year BEST-PRACTICES

6. HackerNoon Contributor of the Year REST-API

7. HackerNoon Contributor of the Year MONGODB

8. HackerNoon Contributor of the Year CSS

9. HackerNoon Contributor of the Year CODING-SKILLS

   
   

As a writer in the tech industry, I believe that web technologies are the most exciting technologies of the present because they are changing the world by bringing people closer to each other. Learn more about my views on web technologies and my journey in the tech industry via the interview below.

1. What do you currently do and what’s your favorite part about it?

Now I am participating in developing an e-commerce startup project. It is exciting to observe and be involved in all stages of project development. I only recently started my current project from the prototyping stage, and now a large company is investing in us. Now we have a chance to continue to implement our ideas. In these moments, I feel that I am creating something new that can change many people`s lives in the country or even the world.

2. How did you get started with your Tech Career?

Back in high school, I loved math. I especially liked solving problems with an asterisk and Olympiad tasks. Sometimes I could sit over them for hours searching for the right solution. It was very captivating and intriguing to me.

Later, in the 9th grade, I got my hands on a 10th-grade computer science textbook. In it, I found programming tasks, in my opinion, in Pascal. They seemed interesting to me and I really wanted to learn how to solve them. At that time, I didn’t have a computer at home yet, and I asked a teacher to let me study computer science on a school computer on my own after school. The teacher was shocked, but, to my joy, she allowed it. Since then, I have decided that I want to connect my life with computers. Therefore, after school, I went to enter the university for specialties related to software.

While still at university, I started working as a programmer in a small company. Then in my life was a lot of work on myself, reading documentation, and career growth.

3. If Utopia were a color what color do you think it’d be and why?

Utopia is a place that does not exist. So the color should be the same. We can`t see true black. Everything we call black in life is a shade of gray. Even if a color suddenly appears with a total hemispherical reflectance equal to 0%, we do not see it. It means the waves in the visible spectrum are not reflected from the object and do not enter our eyes.

I like bright colors, but my answer to this question is: Utopia would be black (#000000).

4. If everything about HackerNoon changed drastically, what is one detail you’d like to keep exactly the same?  OR What’s your favorite thing to do with HackerNoon and why?

I love pictures and gifs in emails from HackerNoon. They seem to bring a unique identity and atmosphere to your project. Whatever happens, please leave them. They are incomparable.

5. Tell us more about the things you write/make/manage/build!

As I wrote earlier, I am working on a startup project in which a large company has invested. Now we are actively expanding our development team. At the same time, along with the team`s expansion, the project itself must also be able to grow. Therefore, I am currently developing a new distributed project architecture and a plan for its implementation.

In addition to architecture, we should not forget the convenience and efficiency of developing large teams. Our DevOps is actively working on setting up CI/CD. For my part, it is essential to write high-quality documents describing the process of publishing and placing code in repositories.

The project architecture change is not an easy and responsible job. But I love it. Before my eyes, the project turned from a small prototype into a distributed system.

6. What’s your favorite thing about the internet?

What excites me most about the Internet is that it can change people`s lives, families, and the world.

You do not need huge money to learn a lot of modern professions. Having not spent a lot of time, you can find information from all over the world for free. There are enough people on the Internet ready to answer any question and help you understand a complex topic. Thanks to the global network, you can find an employer, earn money and spend it successfully. To build your career and comfortable life, you need an inexpensive device and Internet access. It is amazing.

The Internet brings people together. It`s unbelievable when you need to make a slight movement with your finger, and you are already talking and seeing a person thousands of kilometers away from you on another continent. In social networks, people meet, fall in love and create families.

We live in a great time when the world is changing quickly. I think the Internet plays a significant role in this.

7. It’s an apocalypse of ‘walking dead’ proportions and you can only own a singular piece of technology, what would it be?

It is a rather tricky question. A lot depends on what tools we have at the apocalypse time. Do we have electricity, are computers connected to the network? Perhaps only pigeon mail will be available as a data transfer technology in this challenging time.

Imagine that we have stable access to electricity and a global network connecting many computers. Dead people love delicious brains, so we have a shortage of developers. Many of our colleagues have already been eaten. Some of the rest will lose their lives in the future. Let`s unite all developers under the single, simplest technologies - HTML, CSS, and javascript. Every web developer has to work with them. Thanks to these technologies, it is possible to achieve minimal results fairly quickly.

8. What is your least favorite thing about the internet?

My biggest dislike of the Internet is that people on social media seem prettier, brighter, and bolder than in real life. I think it`s dangerous. Content consumers can compare their lives to the idealized lives of their idols, which may not exist in real life. It may be the cause of the development of psychological diseases.

9. If you were given $10 million to invest in something today what would you invest in and why?

I would invest in projects related to education and bioengineering. The world is changing very quickly around us. It is crucial for our children and us to be flexible and to promptly and efficiently process a large amount of information. Modern online education is the best way to help us deal with this. Bioengineering, in turn, will help us buy time to bring all our ideas to life.

10. What’s something you’re currently learning or excited to learn?

Recently I read Martin Kleppmann`s book Designing Data-Intensive Applications. It is a great book covering basic and complex database designs. It covers deeply the different architectures and concepts used in designing RDBMS, network systems, and NoSQL databases. It further covers distributed systems, transactions, problems, and solutions. It`s a must-read book for everyone dealing with system designs.

11. Would you rather travel 10 years into the past or 10 years into the future? Give reasons for your answer.

I would go to the future. It is interesting for me to see how our world will change and what technologies will be. In the future, I will have more chances to return to my own time.