Andrei Zmievski

Who is Andrei Zmievski?

I’m a web developer and founding member of Analog Coop, living and working in San Francisco. Along with my Analog colleagues, I work on things like Mapalong and Brooklyn Beta. Prior to forming Analog, I was the Open Source Fellow at Digg and a platform engineer at Yahoo.
For the past decade, I’ve been a core developer of PHP and member of the PHP Group, helping curate development of the world’s most popular web platform. Along the way, I started the PHP-GTK and Smarty projects, co-wrote PHP Developer’s Cookbook, and architected the Unicode and internationalization support in PHP.
I’m a regular speaker at conferences like the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, ApacheCon, ZendCon, and other leading web events around the world.

What does your typical day look like?

I work mostly from home or a cafe, so there’s no clear separation between work stuff and home stuff for me. I usually try to get a 3-4 mile run in every other day as well as some other exercise to keep in shape and get energy going. In the morning, I’ll have some coffee and catch up on the latest social news stuff, then talk with my co-workers who are a few timezones away. The rest of the day I do work stuff and then see what’s going to around San Francisco that evening.

What do you do in your free time?

Depends on the time of the year and the mood. For outdoor activities I like riding my bicycle and going sailing sometimes. My current project is to walk on all the hills of San Francisco (there are 42 of them!) and photograph them. I enjoy the company of friends and try to spend time with them every week. I also love good beer and I brew some of my own. If you ever want to try a craft beer yourself, I can heartily recommend Russian River Pliny the Elder, which is an Imperial IPA.

Where and when did you start programming?

I started with an old programmable calculator in 1986, when I was about 10 years old, back in Uzbekistan. It was this beast.

Favorite: Programming Languages, Frameworks?

I’ve done a lot of stuff in C and I still like it, despite what bad things may be said about it. It forces you to think on a lower level and understand the implications of your actions. For higher-level stuff I like PHP or Python. I don’t use a lot of frameworks, because I find that they force you into a contract that is hard to escape from when you need more flexibility. So I use micro-frameworks for web stuff mostly.