Think Big and Keep Growing: Interview with Noonies Nominee Vlad Gukasov

Hey Hackers!

I’m Vlad Gukasov and I’m the Senior Software Engineer at Akma Trading.

First of all, a huge thanks to the HackerNoon community and staff for considering me worthy of this opportunity.

I’ve been nominated in the following categories and if you like my writing, please do check out these award pages and vote for me:

1. Tell us about your journey. What do you do and what do you love about it?

I have 5+ years of experience in developing scalable back-end systems. I passed a journey from a junior back-end dev to the lead SWE position during this period.

Today I have a Senior Software Engineer role in a Fintech company. We develop a trading platform with millions of users worldwide, and I’m responsible for communication tooling.

2. Tell us more about your work. What do you make/write/manage/build?

As a software engineer, my job is to research, design, and implement tech things to solve customers' problems. I work in Fintech, the most rapidly changing product area in my experience. Every day I solve complex problems to ensure that millions of users of our platform will be happy. In particular, I create communication tools that allow business to reach their customers. There are: Push Notifications, Emails, SMS, Messengers, and Stories. Every channel has to be resilient and has high deliverability because it directly affects customer experience and company revenue.

3. How did you start writing? What made you choose HackerNoon for publishing your work?

Since I’ve collected a lot of product and tech experience, I focus on sharing my knowledge with the community by writing articles. I compared different platforms for publishing, and, in my opinion, HackerNoon has the best community, articles, and editor. And I would lie if I said that I don’t like Hackernoon’s emails with a lot of memes inside 😄

4. What excites you in tech? Tell us about your favorite technology and why you are passionate about it.

I’m excited about how technology is integrated into our daily routine. Socializing, finance, healthcare, taxi, fast deliveries — every part of our lives contains integration with technology, making it mostly better. And I’m glad to be a part of the community that creates these improvements.

5. What were some of the challenges you faced being a tech writer and how did you overcome them?

The biggest challenge is to focus on writing for several hours without interruption. The process is kinda complex because you need to show your thoughts clearly, and nowadays there are a lot of interruptions everywhere. But when you’ve got in “flow“, you can spend many hours writing with easy and enjoy.

6. What are you learning/reading currently? Any recommendations for our readers?

Though technology and the job sphere are important, in my free time, I try to read non-technical literature. I am reading the second part of Liu Cixin's science fiction novel trilogy “The Three-Body Problem. “ This book contains a non-trivial story and interesting facts from science (for instance, quantum physics).

For readers, I recommend not to get hung up on your professional area and always explore other subject areas. It broadens your horizons, and this knowledge can randomly come in handy in a few years.

7. What is your biggest achievement so far?

Five years ago, I founded a SaaS platform for digital marketers that integrates the most popular advertisement systems in Eastern Europe. The project had a lot of positive feedback from customers. It was also a great challenge for me since I implemented everything myself: UI/UX, product features designing, front-end, back-end, infrastructure, and customer support.

8. If we gave you 10 million dollars to invest in something today, what would you invest in and why?

I would invest it in Bitcoin when it costs 60k and will sell at 20k. Just kidding (or not? 🤔 ).

Right now I’m interested in web3 technology and decentralization idea. For sure, there are a lot of fake projects trying to raise money on hype, but some can be successful in the future and an outcome from them will be huge.

9. What advice would you give to someone just starting in this field?

The key to success, for starters, lies between two significant concepts: think big and keep trying. You shouldn’t be scared of big complex projects. Every software engineer has seen many obstacles and somehow solved them. So I advise you not to give up and try again and again even if a problem seems too complex.

Voting opens on 15th August 2022.