Vladimir Tarasov

Biography

I guess it’s the fact that I can not live without drive. I feel sick when I have nothing to long for. I participated in organizing cinema festivals, contributed in making free movie translations, played paintball for six years and still get addicted to different extreme activities. Now I’m one of the organizers of Agile Latvia and Latvian Developers Network communities. Who knows in what direction I will go in the next couple of years? Not me. The other fact is that I’m a very lazy person. I don’t like doing things inefficiently or without a reasonable purpose. There’s always more than one way to achieve a goal. For example, you can dig a hole using your bare hands. It would take a lot of time and be quite painful, but you’ll succeed in the end. Or you can use a shovel and dig the hole much faster. Or you can use dynamite and make it very fast and very big. Or you can ask somebody for help. Or you can find an alternative solution when this hole is not needed at all. As I mentioned, I’m too lazy to do things inefficiently and so I try to find a way to improve the process. Sometimes I’ve even changed the goal to see the problem at a different angle. It’s called the lean way of doing things. It was common sense 8 years when I started to practice XP as a developer and it still is today.

And so that’s the third unknown fact about me: I don’t consider myself an Agile or Lean person, but a person who is convinced that every task has the best tool whatever it might be — waterfall, XP, Scrum, Kanban, Continious Delivery and so on, and this tool depends greatly on the experience of the person who uses it.