We continue our series of stories about interesting people who make products at Innocode.
This time meet Stepan Paholyk, one of our iOS developers on Relevance Panel.
He started to make home projects with friends, and always pushed them to GitHub, which proved — sometimes you don’t need a prior commercial experience to get a job if your GitHub is green:)
Hope, you enjoy it, and share among students you know)
Tell us what are you doing now at Innocode?
I am iOS developer and work on Relevance Panel — a news product of Innocode.
We are three iOS devs in a team: me, Olya, who has recently come back from maternity leave and Ivan, who used to be iOS dev, but now is our Product Manager (though still helps with iOS). Also, we have 2 backend developers — Volodymyr Sveredyuk and a remote teammate Dmytro Koren. They work with APIs on Ruby. Plus, multitasking developer Il'ko Fedak — he does mostly frontend and sometimes backend on several projects. Yura Chaban is our UX Designer and Sashko Tomyn finds bugs:)
As a part of iOS team, I’m making news applications for our clients Budstikka and Hitra-Froya. Recently, we released Budstikka app — now it’s on AppStore and people already use it.
Alright, and how did you become a developer?
Ahaha, that’s a very funny story right from a dungeon…
I was in the middle of my 2nd year of studies at the University (Lviv Politecnic University, Faculty of Computer Science). At that time they had a lot of budget places (where you don’t have to pay tuition fee), and I had nice exam results in Maths and Physics, so it wasn’t a problem to get there. So, passed the first year... and then the second.. A weird thing — I felt like it’s not for me, so I decided to take a half-year leave to think about life. It was summer time at grandparents home and I decided to earn a bit of money.
So I became a coalminer :) I even have a certificate of a qualified mine-worker:)
OMG, how was it?
Uh, it was like hell. I would not wish even an enemy to be there.
On the first working day, packed with the 25kg of instruments on me, I went down to the mine. As I walked through the tunnel I felt the water started to come. More and more. Suddenly I realized that I was standing half in the water…
And it took us 3 days to fix the problem…
How old were you?
I was 19 :) In general I worked only one month in the mine. Later, I asked to move me to the Tech Department, because it was unbearable…
Around this time a friend from University campus called me and told to buy MacBook and start learn iOS. There was not that many work in the Tech Department, so, for the next 5 months I combined it with learning the basics of programming. Then, from my savings I bought MacBook and came back to the University to learn iOS.
I started with Objective-C. It was an online course and it took me around 5 months to learn basics of iOS. That may seem too long, but I knew that I had to practice — you won’t learn anything from just reading stuff. You’ve got to type it:)
We had a Playstation in the campus, and together with a friend we decided to make an app, that could generate matches based on algorythm, track results etc. It’s still not in AppStore, but it works and the whole code is in GitHub.
How did you decide to look for a job?
Friends kept telling me “dude, you know the stuff, go look for a real job!”. I thought “OK, maybe they know better” (I always have doubts that I know enough). It was the end of February, beginning of May — Innocode was the 6th company I sent my CV to.
And you ended up at Innocode:)
Huh, and I’m really happy, that I didn’t get offers from the previous 5:)
After all those interviews with no result I was kind of sceptical. But found an iOS Dev vacancy at Innocode — I didn’t know anything about you, guys and decided to try. What in the end I had to lose? And the office looked nice, with cookies:))
The next day Iryna, your COO added me on Skype. We talked, she said you need someone with commercial experience and I didn’t have any, but still she sent my CV further inside Innocode. There was a link to my GitHub with some personal projects. Someone at Innocode looked at it (I think it was Ivan) and decided I deserve the Test Task :)
And now starts the funny part)) Because I didn’t do it:)
What do you mean?
No one sent it to me. But one day Ira calls:
Ira: “Stepan, your test task is very cool! Come to the interview tomorrow!”
Me: “Pardon, but I think it is a mistake. Are you talking about GitHub?” (you can imagine I was stuck)
Ira: “Yes! Everything looks great, you have done even more than we need, we are waiting for you!”.
I was like OK, why not, maybe I didn’t get something, but I want to come to the interview))
So, I came, we talked about product, my tech skills, all seemed fine indeed, but then:
Ivan said “Alright, time to look at your test task!”.
And I was like “Test task? Which test task?.”
In the end everything was fine, because the task was to write kind of a news application, which I did even before — for myself. And it was on the top of my GitHub, so it looked like I did the test task :)
It’s my last year at University. I still have to study, but everyone there undertands if you work. So the main thing to do is pass all the laboratory tests, prepare thesis and no one will expell you from the University.
And if you like the story you can check if we are hiring (we are!) here — http://bit.ly/2vbFsfV.
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