Today we get to talk to Sviatlana Matsiuk, who tells us about her role as a Senior Java Developer and all the exciting changes at King. Is the Kingdom the perfect playground for the curious mind? Yes, because it’s very much about the future for Sviatlana. It's about her continual career development, which was one of the things that attracted her to King. We discuss the importance of always being future-facing and why being curious is such an essential mindset for anyone working in tech.
First of all, congratulations on being promoted!
Thank you. Yes. It was very, very cool for me, this achievement. I joined King in November 2020, so I'm very happy. But funnily enough, my role is now more of a Senior Engineer than a Developer, which is also very cool.
What’s the difference between a Developer and an Engineer?
For me, I think a Developer is more specific; you are developing stuff, you are connected with coding and creating features and elements in the game.
I believe the Engineer is a more creative role than a Developer – some kind of artist. You need to be creative, know how to take designs, files, and turn them into features, and come up with ideas that will expand the story. We do that in our teams, lots of coming up with ideas. You need some ways of thinking, and being able to analyse stuff, but I believe it's also about creativity.
When you start your career, it's very good to do as much as you can, engineering and developing, before you decide on a route you really want to follow. You must be open-minded; you never know what you'll be called on to do.
We know there are big changes going on, can you tell us about your role in that?
We are now witnessing a stage in our project where we are moving to the Cloud. That's why the daily routine has changed a lot. Right now, I mostly do engineering, deciding on architectures and finding solutions. I work in a small team, about 10 of us at any time. This is how we tend to work in King, smaller teams. But of course, we communicate with lots of other teams, and bring others in when necessary.
We have five teams in our department. And we need to communicate with them to come up with a solution and divide our responsibilities. We have lots of brainstorming. We are checking terrain solutions. So, for me, right now, less coding, more discussing solutions and making templates and Golden Path guides and so on.
What's a Golden Path? It sounds great.
Yes, it sounds like a feature in Candy Crush! It just means finding the best way of doing something, which is very important to us in this time of transition to the Cloud. This transition is huge for us, and we must find many Golden Paths to work our way through it. There are so many moving parts, the transition has to be seamless for our players all around the world.
Transitioning from being a mix of on-prem to entirely Cloud-based, what are the advantages for Developers and Engineers?
First of all, the Cloud itself is very progressive to me; the main benefit being that it offers lots of tools out of the box in one place. For a Developer, if I want to link to some logging and alerting systems and maybe messaging stuff, I'll have three parts together; if I was using three different systems or three different software, it would be not complete.
It's solvable, of course. Everything is solvable, but more complicated. The Cloud offers you everything connected with each other and in one place.
We will see more and more details about our application performance through the data. You can catch more and notice something earlier if there are any problems. In general, it will be very interesting and challenging to learn but very beneficial to me. I see the Cloud as fresh air. And for everybody, Cloud is mainstream now. And it's really fun and very interesting – great for self-development, as this transition increases your educational level and skills in general.
You say the Cloud excites you because of all the new opportunities. It seems that Learning & Development are very important to you.
Yes, they are. Learning has to be a mindset in this profession. Because things are constantly changing so fast. You can become old-fashioned and irrelevant if you don't make your personal development a priority. You must make it part of your job.
I'm a Senior Java Developer, but I'm reading a lot of articles, and I see that Python is now becoming used more, and it may be the main language used now. There is more software written in Python than in Java already.
Maybe if I was a student now, I would be concentrating on Python. But five years ago, it was Java. You have to be ready for changes. But for now, Java is perfect for us. And I think that Java has developed a lot. As a software, they've changed their product development strategy. They're releasing faster and more frequently, and they're keeping on track. I don't see any reason for us to change, it's still good. But as I say, we must always keep our eye on the future, which is always what we do at King. But we must also do what's best for the present and the players and the game experience now – and that's Java.
What other learning and development opportunities are you taking up?
There are lots, it's very much encouraged. That is what I constantly enjoy about King, unlimited possibilities. And I actively use all the options. King pays for your certification exams, so you can get this Google certificate, it's good for your theoretical knowledge. I'm currently attending courses, which were organized here by our Shared Tech team, on our inner core platform. It was external tutors teaching us Kubernetes and Kubernetes features. It was two different courses side by side. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but it's an open-source platform that manages and contains workloads. It will, I think, become more and more important to us in the future.
Meet the Future
