Maksym Bartkov: We implement projects for the USA, Canada, Great Britain
Already at the age of 23, Maksym Bartkov from Kharkiv worked as a Java Team Lead in a large IT company.
Now the 26-year-old Ukrainian actively speaks at international IT conferences, writes articles for niche sites, judges authoritative hackathons.
Bartkov is a co-author of the Bucket4j library — the most popular Java library in the world for solving bandwidth-limiting problems and a co-author of the book Spring Rest Building Java Microservices and Cloud Applications.
We tried to find out from the resident of Kharkiv the recipe for rapid advancement on the career ladder and his plans for 2022.
– Maxim, you willingly take part in international conferences. Is it possible to say that such activity allows you to additionally monetize yourself as a specialist?
– First of all, I speak in order to structure my own knowledge. This allows you to delve into the details of the context I am talking about.
And, I agree, speaking at conferences makes me more recognizable.
– A resume that contains links to conference presentations makes a specialist more attractive to employers. I was able to develop well the open-source project, in which I am a co-author.
People always came to me with questions after the reports. Or write to me and ask for details.
This allows you to get to know the world’s leading programmers, and connections with such people are rare.
Maksym Bartkov
– What projects are you implementing right now?
– I am a backend developer with more than 8 years of commercial experience. I write in the Java programming language.
At the moment, I am a technical leader in a company that specializes in software development in the fintech industry – banks and other financial structures.
The main task is to make technical decisions related to the architecture of our software (Internet banking of one of the major European banks).
– My goal is to ensure that our Internet banking can withstand heavy loads. The system is used by more than a million people a day, and it needs to cope with such a load. At the same time, it is important that its speed of operation is as fast as possible.
Also, our system should be able to easily scale from the point of view of load, and we could supplement it with various functionality.
And of course, in addition to making architectural decisions, one of my main tasks is writing code.
– Which of the implemented projects are you most proud of?
– Unfortunately, due to the NDA I have signed on almost all projects, I cannot reveal the details.
But fortunately, the project I’m most proud of is open-source, the Bucket4j library.
– This is a tool that helps projects implement contractual obligations to limit the number of requests to the server. That is, it limits the number of incoming and outgoing requests to the server at high loads.
The library is downloaded about 250 thousand times a month and is the most popular solution for this task for the Java language.
– Let’s try to dispel some myths inherent in the Ukrainian IT industry.
It is believed that in Ukraine this is an elite caste that works for foreign markets, receives a salary in dollars or euros and grows by 20 percent annually. This is one of the best professions in Ukraine today. Can you object?
– In general, this is true. But there are nuances. For example, regarding salary. I started my career more than 8 years ago with a salary of $150. But already in a year I managed to reach a salary of $1000.
– Further, every year + $1,500-2,000, which is much ahead of the market, since on average in the market, a specialist in my area grows by $700-800 annually. And so the first few years.
Then, already after 4 years, salary growth slowed down. This is not easy to do in other markets in Ukraine.
– But, in order to realize such growth, I spent a huge amount of time. I worked during the day, and in the evening I learned something new in IT for myself, wrote codes. I steadily spent half of my days off on self-development.
As a result, I acquired an impressive number of health problems. So I don’t really recommend doing that. I do not agree with those who consider the profession of a programmer uncomplicated, based on the fact that there are a lot of programmers in the country, and the salaries there are sweet.
For Ukraine, such an IT community works for good. Programmers invest most of the funds they earn in our economy – they buy real estate and generally increase the solvency of the Ukrainian market.
– A couple of years ago, you admitted that you dream of working at Netflix in the future. Have you not given up on this idea?
– As the famous Ukrainian poet Vasyl Symonenko wrote, You can choose everything in the world, my son. You cannot choose only the Motherland.
From Kharkiv, I implemented projects for the USA, Canada, Great Britain and even exotic Mauritius. I am not going to stop in self-development.
Many programmers dream of working in Silicon Valley. Netflix is a global mega-brand. It’s like playing in the football Champions League.
– Who do you see yourself in five years?
– The dream remained unchanged – to work as a leading developer at Netflix. Another goal is to speak at least 30 Java conferences in the next 5 years.
