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Interview: Developer for yourself

Anastasiia Bergmann — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:09:53 +0000

interview: Developer for yourself

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Interview: Developer for yourself

Philipp Bondarev

Python developer

Sometimes the path into IT doesn’t start with a team or mentors, but with lonely attempts to understand why your program won’t run.
That’s how the journey of Philipp, a Python developer, began — learning the profession entirely on his own. Today, he is responsible for the architecture of complex systems.
This is his story about self-education, discipline, and the philosophy of “necessity and sufficiency.”

— How did you start your journey in development?

Many people are lucky to begin their careers “under the wing” of experienced colleagues. I, however, had to figure everything out on my own — though this isn’t something extraordinary.

My path felt like moving in the dark: a constant struggle with the sensation of drowning in a flow of new information. You’re banging your head against the ice, trying to grasp what you’ve just read. Every single step and line of code feels like a weight of responsibility.
Eventually, I realized that it’s completely normal to not understand something new on the first try. Only when you accumulate a critical mass of knowledge do parallels with already familiar concepts start to form naturally.

— How did you come to programming?

Everyone enters the world of development in their own way. In my case, the trigger was the inefficiency of processes in the design bureau where I had worked for seven years. There were no programmers around, so I armed myself with articles and books.

I began creating internal applications that turned out to be quite useful for our department. They were in demand and genuinely enjoyable to work on — which helped me quickly shift my focus from my main job in the bureau to solving engineering tasks through software.
Although I must say, the experience I gained in the bureau later helped me a lot in development.

— What changed when you first took on a large-scale system?

Three years later, I was offered the chance to work on a much larger system. For a moment, I had a timid hope of joining a team of more experienced colleagues — I really lacked the simple ability to discuss everyday developer problems with someone.

But… I turned out to be the only backend engineer, and on top of that, the one performing the duties of a system architect. All decisions were on my shoulders, and I couldn’t discuss most things in public chats due to an NDA.

— How did you deal with having no colleagues you could ask for advice?

Sometimes you can discuss very specific questions in communities, but as I said, NDA limits that as well. So I make most decisions myself.
What helps is one principle I learned back when I was working as an engineer — the principle of “necessity and sufficiency.” Everything else grows out of this like a crystal forming around a seed.

— How does this principle show up in your day-to-day work?

Over five years on the project, I’ve been through many stages — from excitement and eager adoption of new concepts to giving in to user requests (users here being other developers and managers), even when it messed up the code. I swear, sometimes I felt almost physical pain looking at what came out from under my “pen.”
But with time, things stabilized.

Someone needs an endpoint “by yesterday”? Okay, let’s do it.
They ask to postpone testing and jump straight to implementing authorization? I don’t think it’s a good idea, but I’ll rethink the requirements and use ABAC instead, where ACL is enough…

— What does working solo mean to you?

Working solo is about finding balance between an “ideal” solution and a “working” one.
When you have a team, they stop you in time.
When you’re alone, it’s easy to get carried away and build countless layers of abstractions and “adapter-manager-gateways” with a whole k8s cluster running on a single machine.

Mastery here is in foreseeing problematic development paths and avoiding them with minimal overhead.

— What helps you avoid overengineering and stop in time?

I always come back to the question: “Is what I’m about to do truly necessary, and is what I’ve already done sufficient?”

Ask yourself: how often have you spent time splitting two abstractions just so one could be replaced later? How often do the chosen technologies actually change?
Why build a universal repository if the entire project uses just one data source?
Most of the time, the answer to all these questions is negative—or close to it.

— Is simplicity a compromise or maturity?

I understand the desire for elegance and the instinct to cushion every possible fall. But very often it’s unnecessary.

At the same time, I’m not calling for abandoning common principles — generations of developers forged them through struggle and late-night tears. They paid too high a price for us to simply discard them.
What matters is learning to stay on that thin line between what’s necessary and what’s sufficient.

— And if you had to summarize your entire path with one piece of advice - what would it be?

Don’t let the excitement you had at the beginning fade away.
Curiosity for everything new should pull you out of bed each morning and send you hunting for knowledge, satisfying the natural hunger of a thinking human.

Programming is the unique craft that lets you combine the strict logic of engineering with the burning inspiration of creativity.

We take care of the search for a solution for you.

Inform us about your needs. We will call you for a first chat after receiving your request.

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QA & Test Automation for STRABAG Data Platform

Anastasiia Bergmann — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 07:11:24 +0000

QA & Test Automation for STRABAG Data Platform

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QA & Test Automation

Client:

STRABAG

Country:

Type of service:

Manual Testing,
Automated testing

Background:

The company – client is STRABAG. One of the top 5 largest construction companies in Europe that provides the construction services for more than 180 years, implementing over 15,000 projects worldwide projects per year.

Scope:

STRABAG is a multi-project company. The product of the Client required the full-cycle testing and was live when the QA engineer provided by Bergmann Infotech joined the team.

The task was to provide a large scope of testing services for its internal Data Storage and Analytics platform with respect to the fact that the platform was already live and had thousands of active internal users. In such a case, it is critical to align the QA expert’s work with the existing policies, to cause zero interference while bringing from the first day the maximum positive impact.

The client was looking for a QA service provider that would not just perform web functional testing, but would also do the following:

Review, analyze and test design of the product, its functional requirements, integration requirements.
Execute full regression tests before every release.
Become part of the development team for better defect analysis through all the defect life cycle.
Investigate and report defects; verify bug fixes.
Prepare the test documentation in the large variety of the documents required according to the internal standards of the product development.
Develop an automation framework to optimize regression testing, to make tests a part of the CI pipeline.

Solution:

The QA engineer had joined the development team during the development stage. Starting the first day there were two main goals set up:

Before proposing or making any changes to the QA process, the QA engineer made sure to get very familiar with the product via various ways: executing tests, reading all available documentation, running exploratory testing.

Initial important suggestions that were made after having a clear picture of the testing process included the following:

To have a stable testing environment that must be as prod-like as possible.
As platform is a data storage, it was crucial to have a clear analysis of data mostly used by users on prod and to include this data analysis into product requirements.
Taking into account results of data analysis, to plan relevant testing activities to test the processing of the required data types on platform.
To prepare a protected set of test data.
To test designs of the product before the development has started – to get an earliest understanding of the planned functionality and to find future possible omissions, conflicts and possible defects as early as possible.
To run smoke testing on prod after every release as soon as possible in a seamless way for active users.
To automate the quality status reports.

First scope of work that existed on the early stage looked like a combination of

Second scope of work became possible once the test process was improved and stabilized. It finally became possible to develop the automation of testing using Java, Rest Assured and Selenide framework.

The testing services continue to be provided covering all the requested types of testing within the agreed timeline.

Functional testing: to verify the product behavior against the requirements.
Performance testing: to verify the load / time parameters set for the product.
UX testing: to validate the interface and the related user experience.
Compatibility testing: to run cross-browser and cross-platform tests.
Integration testing: checks of the stability and correctness of the communication of isolated platform’s modules.
Large End2End testing: detailed testing based on use cases and user behavior on a System level of the product under test.
Confirmation testing: to retest and verify fixes of previous defects in the functionality.
Smoke testing: to check the basic functionality after every release.
Regression testing: to run a planned clearly set scope of tests to get a reliable status of the product quality and release readiness between the development and deployment.

Results:

Every product release candidate is tested on pre-defined browsers and platforms before the release.
The detected problems are logged, prioritized, and quickly communicated to the developers. Only test management and bug reporting tools are used for that, no side ways to track or monitor defects.
The constant, clear and fast communication between the QA engineer and the developers, product managers is set up.
The quality status reports are automated using test management and reporting tools.
The reliable and constantly maintained library of test documentation exists and is used.
The QA engineer not just actively participates in testing activities, but supports oher QA engineers working and joining the project, reviews other QA engineers, autotests, monitors quality gates parameters.

Also it is reasonable to highlight the fact how much automation performed by QA engineer improved the testing process overall:

Full manual regression gets more and more replaced by automated test runs. Manual efforts are required to support in new or currently not automated cases only.
Time and costs saved by implemented automation are significant. For example just one of the modules of the platform required 32 h / month of manual work to execute regression and e2e tests. After the automation was made the every night automated test runs with zero manual work required.
Automation gave more stability of tests and larger test coverage that is clearly measured.

Domain:

Testing services:

Full testing process including:

Tech Stack:

JAVA

Gradle

Rest Assured

Allure Report

Selenide

Bug Tracker:

Jira

Test Management system:

Zephyr

Author:

Alena Badzilouskaya

We take care of the search for a solution for you.

Inform us about your needs. We will call you for a first chat after receiving your request.

The post QA & Test Automation for STRABAG Data Platform appeared first on Bergmann Infotech.

How our IT outsourcing works with Eastern Europe (nearshoring)?

Anastasiia Bergmann — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 11:09:22 +0000

How our IT outsourcing works with Eastern Europe (nearshoring)?

Digitalization has long covered almost all sectors of the economy. Big-league players and start-ups, small and medium enterprises alike need own tailor-made software. Most demanded are frontend design, website, app or backend developments as well as UI or UX design. However, these programming services must not be too costly for customers.

Cutting costs, yet preserving quality through IT outsourcing to neighboring countries

01.

How can I order high quality software development at low cost?

The solution is outsourcing to neighboring countries (nearshoring): that is programming shifted to neighboring countries. IT outsourcing to Eastern European countries is often appropriate for Western Europe.

02.

What are the pros of software development projects with IT-nearshoring?

03.

How to organize IT-nearshoring?

How does project management related to IT-outsourcing work?

01.

If you need an IT team to implement your project:

The team of developers with the required specialization is located in Eastern Europe and supported by the core team in Germany.
The contact person/project manager is in Germany.
The lead of the project development team manages all development and communication processes, supervises compliance with deadlines and checks quality.
The customer receives regular feedback on the current development status.
The contract is made with the German company.

02.

If you need certain IT experts to temporarily reinforce your existing team:

The IT experts with the required expertise are in Eastern Europe.
The contact person is in Germany.
The contact person coordinates and integrates the required IT experts into the existing team or project.
All IT experts can replace each other, so the risk of work halts is low.
The contract is made with the German company.

Project development with the help of our nearshore-experts

01.

Pros:

Approved quality of software solutions.
Cost reduction.
Effective communication thanks to the project manager, normally a native German speaker.
Immediate project start.
End-to-end project management or project support by individual IT experts.
Minimal risk of work halts due to IT expert interchangeability.

Need a quote of your customized software solution or the price for the services of a nearshore-expert? Request here a free and non-binding commercial offer right now!

We take care of the search for a solution for you.

Inform us about your needs. We will call you for a first chat after receiving your request.

The post How our IT outsourcing works with Eastern Europe (nearshoring)? appeared first on Bergmann Infotech.