My name is Alexander Novikov. Welcome to my blog!

If you’re a true professional, your mastery should be reflected in your toolkit. First, it directly affects your efficiency, which in turn impacts the quality of your work. Second, it’s basic comfort—an ease that indirectly influences your entire life. Of course, you can’t help but admire the rock-star engineer who’s written code in Vim their whole life, controls their Tesla from it, and does countless other things that, judging by endless forum debates about tool convenience, “IDE lovers couldn’t even dream of.➤ Read more...

When working with PostgreSQL, query optimization is a crucial skill for maintaining performance in high-load systems. In this post, I’ll show how I optimized a slow query by 50% using a composite index—leveraging PostgreSQL’s EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN ANALYZE commands to diagnose performance bottlenecks and improve efficiency. Why EXPLAIN Matters PostgreSQL provides the EXPLAIN command to analyze query execution plans before execution. It helps developers understand: ✅ How PostgreSQL plans to execute the query➤ Read more...

At my current company, this past review cycle was my fifth. The hardest ones were the first two—when you’re still unfamiliar with the process and unsure about what’s expected of you. What helps me now, and why have I already started preparing for the next one? I’ve structured my experience into different periods, each of which can be approached separately at various stages of the review cycle. 💪 Preparation Period: End of the last performance review → Start of the next performance review➤ Read more...

Once, Hemingway made a bet that he could write the shortest story capable of scaring anyone… He won the bet: Performance Review. Let’s break down what this is, why it always seems to sneak up on you, and whether there’s anything you can do about it. In short, it’s the process of summarizing your work over a specific period. You can find more details here. The existence of such a process indicates a certain level of maturity in a company, but it needs to work correctly to avoid causing you headaches (after all, you came to write code, not reports for managers).➤ Read more...

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The most valuable piece of advice I received early in my programming career: write unit tests. For many inexperienced developers, the requirement to write them causes procrastination or boredom. I still get lazy sometimes, but I still do it. And here I am not talking about the fact that in Avito for a backend developer, writing units for your logic is considered in most cases a necessary requirement for your pull request to be approved, but more about the fact that I really understand the value of this.➤ Read more...

I’ve given this topic a lot of thought. In the past, I used to believe that a Senior specialist writes “otherworldly” code and does it quickly. They could solve any complex task and had answers to every question in their field. Of course, this was an exaggeration, but that’s the direction my thoughts leaned toward. Over time, as I interacted more with engineers at this level (and even higher), I realized they often write code as slowly as juniors.➤ Read more...

How do you kill any desire to review your pull request? Here’s a great example from the open-source project PocketBase: the pull request in question. This is, of course, hyperbole—but extremes make it easier to illustrate a point. Here’s what we’re dealing with: 147 files changed, 1 commit. The project author’s response is hardly surprising: “Thank you for spending your time on this, but this type of changes are not really welcomed as I don’t really see much point of reviewing 140+ files.➤ Read more...

First, ask yourself: should you dive into this field right now, given your current experience? And if so, what’s your goal? If we consider an engineer in a company with well-established processes and a clear division of responsibilities, system design skills are usually expected from more senior developers, generally at or near the senior level. Interviews for such positions often include the classic system design interview, where you might be asked to design Twitter, YouTube, or another popular system.➤ Read more...