Design in Software Development: It's Not About Graphics

Vadim grew up in Podolsk, in an ordinary school that for several years effectively had no physics teacher — nobody could be found — so in the tenth grade he moved to a local lyceum with a physics and maths bias. There pupils arrived at 7:45 to spend fifteen minutes before the lesson going over the previous day, and were handed month-long lists of problems, some unsolvable until the material had been covered; that, he says, taught him to push hard tasks to the end. Alexander recalls his own equivalent — correspondence-school notebooks posted to him and marked by a student, plus faculty booklets of olympiad problems harder than anything in the lyceum. Then came the institute of electronics and mathematics, which Vadim entered following his cousin: he calls the first two years a firmware flash for life, and the calculus lecturer, instead of the usual three or four questions on a ticket, walked every student through all hundred, as Vadim recalls, because the lecturer wanted them to derive everything themselves.

The same years produced a taste for logic and for curiosity. Vadim shows the wave function the exam required you to unfold to its physical meaning rather than memorise, and recalls a giant queueing formula full of roots and powers: for him it is an argument against black-and-white thinking, because a complex system behaves differently on different intervals. Alexander adds the gap engineers know well: from outside it is an interface over a database, while underneath sits analytics over petabytes with latency guarantees. A separate thread is the rabbit hole: the deeper you go into a profession, the larger your contact surface with the unknown, and that can weigh on you. Vadim suggests leaning on curiosity — whatever happens around you, there is always somewhere to dig, language models included. Alexander frames the contrast: social networks are about seeming, while digging in the evening is about being.

The second pillar is games. In the eleventh grade Vadim and his friends put together a StarCraft team and played on Blizzard's server, where the whole world gathered; they trained daily, and the feedback was vivid — play and your rating grows, skip a couple of days and it sags. The same effect, Vadim adds, shows up on LeetCode. For the team he built a site: a hand-written engine on PHP, version four by his own reckoning, a forum from scratch, a clan-wars section, a schedule and an admin panel — effectively a portal, which he still keeps and moved into Docker a couple of years ago; gamification elements were already there. PHP stayed with him: in 2012 he paid 180 dollars for the Zend PHP 5.3 certification at a Moscow training centre, prepared for a month and a half, and had the envelope with stickers posted to Podolsk — and roughly six months later he stopped writing PHP and moved to the front end.

One of his first jobs was the design studio Teleport, which they set up in Podolsk: Vadim took the code and the mark-up, his lyceum friend Kostya Kulagin the design. They built sites for window companies and paid illustrators hired on a freelance exchange more than themselves, chasing quality that still holds up ten years on. One of their most visible pieces was done for free: a map of the Podolsk trolleybus routes, which they rode to the institute themselves. Kostya simply rang the director of the trolleybus depot, agreed it, and the map still hangs in the city's trolleybuses. Hence the principle: build something because you want it to be good, not because management asked. After five and a half years the team split up and Vadim joined Mail.ru to work on travel and air tickets — now as a pure front-end developer, sitting next to designers and realising that design was where he wanted to grow.

Back in the studio Vadim had noticed that a designer drawing a mock-up does not always see the depth hidden behind the technical part — a request to the server, say — and he started reading design books. Cooper explained by example why users should not be hit with modal alerts: the quantity in a basket changes through an asynchronous request, and the reason a form cannot be submitted is written in red right beneath it. Norman, both agree, still reads well today: Alexander retells the fridge example, where the two knobs set not the temperature of each compartment but the overall cold and its distribution — without a mental model the appliance cannot be tuned. Hence the conclusion: start from the person, not from whatever is technically adjustable. Tufte, who barred publishers from his four books and published them himself down to the typography, showed how dots on a map locate the source of an epidemic and how a chart deceives its reader. Another author set an exercise: design a kitchen for a Martian with different gravity and a different number of arms. Tim Brown rode a hospital on a gurney and realised patients spend weeks looking at the ceiling — so the ceilings were redesigned.

The Mail.ru years also brought an intensive at Britanka, twelve days or so by his own recollection, approved by his manager, then calligraphy — prompted by the Steve Jobs biography — courses at the Gorbunov Bureau with Ilya Birman in 2015, and Maxim Ilyahov's course on writing. That course crystallised the main idea: design is about the structure of text, code, teams and relationships, and text can be edited the way code is reviewed; in tickets he introduced a scheme of problem, task and acceptance criteria. Then came the two-year interactive design course: a Hamlet installation where NFC-tagged objects on a table triggered pre-filmed clips, hearts driven over web sockets, projected smaller than planned once the projector proved too weak for the building's facade, and the graduation stove for the pancake festival in Gorky Park — a machine playable only by two, where you pump the bellows to heat a virtual pancake to 99, a figure he quotes with a caveat, and the winning half blinks and releases steam. Both agree the value lies in going end to end: a million corner cases, a laptop dying in the frost among them. The second part, about the work at T-Bank, is promised separately.