Get to Know the Team: Georgi Zhivankin
HelloFresh is a diverse work place and that’s especially apparent when you look at our ever-growing tech team. Since we started this feature a couple of weeks ago, we showcased developers from Macedonia, with Nenad, and Spain, to get to know Sergio. As we move along we’ll be “visiting” quite a number of different countries represented at the office but, for now, it’s time for another long hop across Europe all the way to Bulgaria.
Georgi has been with us for almost a year now and he’s a unique and much cherished member of our team. As legend goes, it turns out that when he submitted his coding test during the application process, we were none the wiser about him being blind. It goes without saying that when he told us about it, that had absolute zero impact in the proceedings. His test was great and he excelled at every other stage of the process. Fast forward a few months and he’s not only very well integrated and providing lots of value on our setup, he’s also one of the kindest (and funniest, especially after downing a couple of beers on our Friday gatherings) people you can ever meet.
Without further ado, meet Georgi!
What is your current role at HelloFresh?
I am a back-end developer working as part of the API team here at HelloFresh. We mainly support and extend code that powers an internal RESTful API, which is responsible for providing information to our website and iOS and Android apps so they can function quickly, look beautiful, and be as efficient on our infrastructure as possible.
What interesting projects have you been involved with so far at the company?
I joined almost a year ago, and throughout that time I have been involved in several projects, mainly related to making our API more efficient, bug-free, and performant. In addition, since I am the only Windows-based developer at the company, and on top of that, I am a blind developer, I spent a considerable amount of time with our awesome dev-ops guys on making our development environment available to be run on Windows with minimal hassle (not an easy task, I can assure you, especially when you throw accessibility into the mix).
Which technologies do you enjoy working with the most?
Before joining HelloFresh, I was exclusively a PHP developer. However, here we have the opportunity to work with a variety of different established and upcoming technologies, so I decided to take advantage of that. At the moment I am tinkering with Golang, as our team is currently enhancing an OAuth microservice written in this beautiful language. In my spare time I played around with a little bit of Python and BeautifulSoap, and I am planning for next year to update my JS skills by picking up NodeJS or React for a personal project that I have in mind. Not forgetting PHP, I am also planning to play around with the a new minimal framework created by Zend called Zend-expressive.
Are there any apps that you can’t live without on your day to day?
There are certainly a few apps I am quite addicted to, but to be honest, they are not as many as they were before. These are Slack for communicating with colleagues in the company, Winamp for listening to my huge personal music collection (I know, I am getting old, but still think Winamp is the best music player ever invented), Eclipse for coding in PHP and Go. Last but not least, in my spare time, I have been fascinated with electronic music since an early age. So at home I am playing with a super nice, intuitive, and accessible piece of DJ software for Mac called djay Pro.
How does a typical day for you at the office look like?
An ordinary day for me in the office begins with a solid dose of coffee or coke. I typically arrive at the office between 9:15–9:45 as I love to have some time to grab a drink, chat to my colleagues and generally prepare for the upcoming day. Then I sit down on my computer, open Slack and Thunderbird to check up on the latest company emails and banter, and if it’s going to be a long or busy day, start my favourite music for working, which is Smooth Jazz. In particular, I love listening to the digital Smooth Jazz channels by Digitally Imported.
Then, we usually have our team daily standup around 10:00–10:20 where we discussed what we have done the day before and any obstacles, blockers, or other pertinent topics to the upcoming tasks for the day. When we wrap up , I usually start tackling my tickets. In a couple of hours, time for lunch rolls in and I usually go out with colleagues from my or other teams to grab lunch in one of the various places around Mitte or Prenzlauer Berg [The districts of Berlin near our office — Ed.]. Then the day continues with the ordinary tickets until it’s time to either call it a day or time comes to drool over German in the German classes that the company have kindly organised for all of us non-Germans.
What do you most enjoy doing outside of the work environment?
Outside of work, I love traveling to places I have never been before, visiting old favourite spots around the world like the young and chill Amsterdam, my spiritual and nostalgic home London, the buzzing Istanbul, or my native hometown of Sofia. I like collecting and mixing Deep House music [Check Georgi’s mixes up on Soundcloud — Ed.], spending time with friends on long nightly walks around the city or in quiet, cosy cafes munching on a good New York-style Cheesecake. Last but not least, staying at home and reading sci-fi books or watching episodes of Mythbusters or Air Crash investigation.
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