Meet the Writer: Engineer and Hacker Noon Contributor, Aleksandr Zakharov

So let’s start! Tell us a bit about yourself. For example, name, profession, and personal interests.

Hey there :smiley: I’m Aleks and I’m mostly doing Web applications. Apart from that, I’m very interested in AI, future of the humankind, politics, the economy, and science.

Interesting! What was your latest HackerNoon Top story about?

The latest article is just about nine things that I’ve figured out to be really important for most successful programmers. Throughout my career, I’ve made many mistakes, but I did retrospectives on them. I’m always thinking a lot about why something happened, and how to prevent it in the future. A set of rules in this article will help you to avoid some of the errors you can easily commit on your way.

Do you usually write on similar topics? If not, what do you usually write about?

No. This is my first experience of sharing experiences via an article like this. I didn’t consider my thoughts to be worthy but I’ve noticed lately that I’m giving advice to my colleagues every so often. That’s why I decided to try to structure it somehow. So this article was born.

Usually, I write about technical things that can be useful to other people or me in the future. Almost always it’s related to technologies that I’m dealing with on my job.

I do have educational articles in Russian though. But I wrote them because didn’t find anything worthy. For example, I did a comprehensive article about iterators in python. Runet didn’t have it before me.

Great! What is your usual writing routine like (if you have one?)

First, I will decide how to title my article. It will put my brain into the context. From there I will do a blueprint. Then draft goes and then final remarks. The whole process is completed within several working sessions. So every session I’m coming with new ideas and fixes to an article.

Being a writer in tech can be a challenge. It’s not often our main role, but an addition to another one. What is the biggest challenge you have when it comes to writing?

For me, the hardest part is to decide what to write about. This choice will steer everything you are doing afterward. So it should be useful interesting and concise enough simultaneously. If the topic is selected correctly it’s all done.

What is the next thing you hope to achieve in your career?

Currently, I’m working on a project that should provide a lot of value for our customers thus money for the company. I’m interested in completing it and resolving challenges along the way. It’s exciting because I’m building a real product and obtaining the real experience of building and managing it.

Wow, that’s admirable. Now, something more casual: What is your guilty pleasure of choice?

Hehe :smiley: It’s youtube. I can go to a rabbit hole of different kinda useful content that is essentially useless for my life :smile: This is my way of wasting time.

Do you have a non-tech-related hobby? If yes, what is it?

Well, all my hobbies are somehow related to tech. I constantly need to learn something new. So from time to time, I’m finding smth that ignites me and starting to explore it. Today’s topics are a global economy and blogs like: https://www.gwern.net/index, https://slatestarcodex.com/, https://guzey.com/. One day I will make my own alike.

What can the Hacker Noon community expect to read from you next?

It will be something techy as usual :nerd_face:

Thanks for taking time to join our “Meet the writer” series. It was a pleasure. Do you have any closing words?

I would like to encourage everyone to not be scared of writing on our lovely HackerNoon. We all have something valuable to share. Cheers! :grin: