„It is the combination of the complexity of our product and the freedom of decision in the platform that excites me“ shares Vitalie, Android Engineer at M‑TRIBES. Read on to learn how Vitalie describes building a complex product like MotionTools from scratch, how he structures his 4-day work week, and what advice he would give his younger self.
Hannah: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions.
You have been part of building our platform for Android from scratch. What have been some of your highlights?
Doing a project from scratch is always exciting since you can bring to life the ideas that live only inside your head. It is unbelievably satisfying to see how a vague concept becomes a working solution for a real-life problem. I still remember the day when we were imagining what the product is going to look like in the future. Some of those things looked optimistic at best, others very unrealistic. Now, it became even more than we've initially imagined. To me, that is the biggest highlight there is.
What have been the biggest challenges in this journey?
Making everything work. Our technology platform is a highly configurable and very complex project with a lot of moving parts. This level of configurability and the amount of features drives up the complexity a lot. The challenge was to make all the configurable components highly decoupled so they can exist one without another and at the same time coexist. Creating this kind of setup was the hardest problem we needed to solve, but I think we've managed that pretty well.
At MotionTools we work mostly in 4-day weeks, asynchronously and with few meetings - how do you structure and organize yourself?
In my opinion, a 4-day week is a perfect balance between the number of working days and the days left to rest. I strongly believe that the amount of work done in a 4-day setup can be even bigger than in a 5-day setup.Usually, when working on a task, a lot of time is spent on clarifications with other team members or product owners regarding the task's specifics. We work asynchronously which means that people contribute from different time zones and different schedules in writing and not just via meetings. While waiting for some team members feedback, I prepare everything that I need before actually starting working on the task. Thus, I'm reading the task's specifications carefully and trying to clarify all open questions that may appear during the implementation phase. For that, we have special meetings with the platform team members where we discuss all of this. This helps reduce the "unknown" from the task considerably and as a consequence reduces the implementation time.
What excites you about our mission at MotionTools?
For me, the things that motivate me the most are the nature of the project and the company organization. It is the combination of the complexity of the product and the freedom of decision in the platform that excites me. Usually, these kinds of big complex projects are filled with legacy code and the companies rarely offer the opportunity to modernize the existing code. At MotionTools, we have the opportunity to decide what should be our technology stack and also when it's time to modernize it. This keeps the project up to date with the latest technologies that help grow and adapt to the latest things in this ever changing world of technology.
If you could go back to when you started out as an Android Developer what advice would you give your younger self?
This is a hard one. The decisions that we make, no matter if they are good or bad shape us just the way we are. Changing that road will probably result in a different "present me" and I don't want that. I'd probably say to myself to keep putting in the work and believe that everything will work out in the end. Sometimes things are hard, but that makes us better.
As the world is slowly opening up again, what are you most looking forward to?
I'd like to do some traveling. In the last couple of years that was hard to do it because of Covid-19 and all the restrictions. Now that the world is opening up, I feel like it is the perfect opportunity to get to see new things and enjoy life.
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