Life at Fuzzy Labs: Misha Iakovlev

We do a lot of great engineering work on our customer projects, and each project has a full team of engineers behind it. In this blog series we’re peeling back the curtain so you can get to know more about our engineers, and find out what a typical day looks like for a Fuzzician.

Misha Iakovlev: Senior MLOps Engineer

6:30 AM

I usually wake up at 6:30 or 7:00, depending on whether this is an office day or not. I am by no means a morning person, so I allow myself enough time to properly wake up before I need to be productive. The morning starts with a shower, followed by brewing coffee for my wife and I. I take my time to enjoy my coffee and toast, listening to podcasts or Youtube videos.

8:40 AM

I am ready to leave for work at around 8am. Commuting by bike takes about 30-40 minutes for me. I found a not so busy route that is actually enjoyable even in the British winter weather.

First things first, I brew the second cup of coffee (on the picture below you can see the apparatus I’m using to brew two cups for a colleague and I). While doing that, I think about the high level plan for the day and note it down. I have tried a few popular productivity techniques, but they didn’t seem to help me be more productive, quite the contrary. I figured out having a list of 3-4 high level tasks for the day, and an occasional pomodoro timer, is all I need to focus.

We usually have team catch-ups and stand-ups early in the morning before 10am. I like to save up the other collaborative parts of my work for the mornings too. So things like PR reviews, Slack conversations and questions, additional planning for the current or prospective projects, and pair programming sessions – all of these are prioritised for before lunch, pushing the implementation tasks to the afternoon where possible.

12:00 PM

Lunch time! I don’t pack any lunch with me, at least not yet. I was working from home for almost 5 years, hence I am greatly enjoying a variety of lunch options in the city centre. The fish and chips place, and the falafel place nearby are definitely my favourite so far. It is also a good time to chat about work, tech, and things in general with colleagues. Before going back to work, the third cup of coffee is of course brewed.

1:00 PM

Fueled up after lunch, it’s time to focus on work again. In the afternoons, I prefer the more deep focus kind of tasks. So larger coding/implementation tickets, literature research, data analysis, and blog writing tend to be done in the afternoon rather than the morning (although not all days can be perfectly balanced like that, I try my best to!)

Right now, I am working on a Fuzzy Labs Squared project centered around optimising ML model energy efficiency. This is a very underexplored area of MLOps, and there are a lot of unknowns and uncertainties. Albeit the industry lags behind on this particular question, thankfully, we have found some research papers on the topic, that we are trying to reproduce and apply to the real world. Which means that this project has been a lot about designing and running experiments, and close collaboration with the teammates on data analysis and implementation tasks. I quite enjoy a good brain teaser, so this project has been a lot of fun!

At the end of the working day, I like to give it a little closure and switch off from an immediate task at hand. Oftentimes this involves reading some tech and science news, catching up with chit chat on Slack, or reading a chapter of an engineering book if I’m reading any. The last book I read like that was Designing Machine Learning Systems by Chip Huyen, which was great but took me embarrassingly long to finish.

5:00 PM

It’s time to head off, and it depends on the day of the week where to. Sometimes I stay in the city centre for some social gatherings. More often than not though, I cycle back home, where I have quick dinner and then either dig into one of the various pet projects or go to pilates (which has had the greatest impact on my wellbeing, since I discovered it a few years ago!)

Later evenings are usually spent slowing down after an as always eventful day. It’s time spent with my wife over some snacks either watching a TV show (right now the one we are watching is Dark), or a video game (either a few rounds of Balatro or replaying Outer Wilds lately), or some reading (I’m still putting off the House of Leaves, but one day I’ll get to it!).