About

Hey! I’m Vasily – happy Team Wrangler at Automattic, mentor, and software development best practices enthusiast.

In this blog, I write about leadership, professional software development, books I read, and a bit about my own life.

I was born in 1989 in Russia. I fell in love with IT at the age of five when I saw the computer for the first time in my life 😍 The idea of pressing buttons to “change the world” admired me so much that defined my way for years ahead 🙂 

I have a passion for systems and think with systems at the back of my mind most of the time. I’ve been studying and building systems of various kinds, sizes, and complexity through the whole my career. Today I’m working on WooCommerce Payments – the best payments solution for WooCommerce platform. It’s another complex technical system I’m building in a company of great people (engineers, product managers, designers, business, and many more) to serve merchants and shoppers all over the world.

Outside work I’m a happy husband and father. I enjoy various sports (basketball, hockey, skiing, and many more), love traveling, learning, and reading books, a bit into finances and investment. Follow the Personal section of the blog to find out more about me with time.

If interested in hearing my voice, check this post.

Blogging

I’ve been thinking about blogging and sharing my thoughts for a while but something was missing. Don’t know for sure if it was courage, discipline, lack of focus or knowledge, or anything else, but it’s not so important. The great Automattic culture and internal blogging group initiative inspired me to start blogging again as an experiment.

I believe that great software products are able to change our lives for the better. However, to create those products many great developers and leaders are needed and I feel there is a huge demand in the industry. I’m blogging with the hope to reduce that gap by helping developers and leads to get better in their profession.

Tech Profile

Background

I studied in a special class at high school with a deep focus on maths and physics and graduated from one of the best engineering universities in Russia (BMSTU) as an IT and Telecommunications engineer.

I worked for a few companies in my life but stayed for decent durations – videoconferencing engineer at CROC Inc. (7 yrs), Full-stack dev & Tech lead at IdeaFox (3 yrs), Developer & Team lead at Automattic (since 2020). You can get more details about my career, positions, and responsibilities in my LinkedIn profile.

Focus

I’ve been curious about creating high-quality software at scale since I got back to development in 2013. 

In the beginning, I was mostly focused on the technology aspect of it studying design patterns, manual and automated testing, tools and frameworks, software architecture, DevOps, team processes, and many other things. 

These days my focus shifted towards the human aspect. I explore and study things like communication, leadership, management, relationships, motivation, learning, and everything else people related in the same context of creating high-quality software at scale.

Tech stack

JavaScript | PHP | HTML | CSS | Less | Sass

React | Redux | Vue | jQuery

Bootstrap | Semantic | Material | WordPress components

Meteor | Node.js | WordPress | Express | Gatsby | MongoDB | MySQL

Jest | Mocha | Puppeteer | PHP Unit

AWS | Heroku | Nginx | Docker

GitHub Actions | Travis CI | GitLab CI

Want to get in touch with me? That’s fantastic!

Please use the form below to send a message or contact me directly at belolapotkov.v@gmail.com.

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