Rephrase and rearrange the whole content into a news article. I want you to respond only in language English. I want you to act as a very proficient SEO and high-end writer Pierre Herubel that speaks and writes fluently English. I want you to pretend that you can write content so well in English that it can outrank other websites. Make sure there is zero plagiarism.: (Photo : ar130405 from Pixabay) Ilya Khrustalev is an IT expert, C-level manager with many years of experience working as CTO, technical enabler and successful team leader of international projects. First, Ilya started his career in game development. He managed massively multiplayer games, ensuring uninterrupted quality work under extremely high system loads. He then helped develop e-commerce services, which today are part of everyday life for millions of users. For instance, as head of engineering, he led the development of the delivery automation system for the international marketplace Lamoda and, from the technical side, launched Foodfox, which later became the leader of the Russian delivery market, Yandex.Food. Ilya shared his experience of working with the most complex IT products and elaborated on how to build effective communication between the development team and the business, develop hard skills and flexible skills, come up with original solutions, and significantly reduce the time required for their implementation. Ilya, you started out rather unusually: you did not receive a specialized higher education, nor did you have any internships in IT companies. How did you begin working in development and get your initial knowledge and skills? I became interested in game development as a child as soon as I got my first computer at home. At the age of 4, I retyped programs from a textbook and watched how they worked. As a teenager, I wrote small applications and games—I used Delphi and Visual Basic. After school, I moved from my hometown to the capital, where my friends invited me. They were involved in game development, including making a popular game, Formula O2, a 3D multiplayer browser-based 3D racing game using Virtools. I got acquainted with commercial development, and got my first professional experience. Fortunately, the studio had many different projects—not just racing games. I was constantly learning new technologies. In parallel, I led several in-house projects. Other than developing hard skills, it also helped flexible skills. I learned how to identify the needs of the client and explain in business-friendly language how to make the project more efficient and cut costs. As a team leader, have you also tried yourself at game development? Yes, I was promoted to team leader while working at IT Territory Game Holding—at that time, Astrum Online Entertainment, the largest player in the interactive entertainment market in Eastern Europe. Our online games attracted tens of thousands of users, which generated a huge number of requests to the server. At Astrum, I learned how to scale high-level systems almost without limitations, and mastered the skills that are mandatory for a senior developer. It was also here that I got my first experience of managing teams. As a team leader, I participated in the launch of several browser games. For the first time, I designed a system from scratch and was responsible for the uninterrupted server operation. Simultaneously, I learned to combine the requirements of the business with the interests and capabilities of the technical team. Then, after Astrum, I worked for some time with the world-famous Badoo service. There, it was even more demanding, with 400 million registered users and a lot of online activity. Badoo worked almost all over the world, although at that time there was no cloud infrastructure yet—the service data “resided” in two data centers. Why did you leave Badoo for Lamoda? Working at Badoo gave me three important assets. First, the level of the team there was fundamentally new for me: I got to know international experts and learned from them. Second, the level of freedom and responsibility was also a novelty. One of my first tasks, for example, was to go through a multi-million user base and evaluate several metrics. All in all, it was a huge responsibility, especially when one has been with the company for only a couple of days. Nevertheless, the nature of the tasks spurred my interest motivated me to grow quickly, to learn new things. Finally, at Badoo, I interacted a lot with the London team: I improved my language skills and gained experience in international communications. However, I left the company because I was interested in a different vector of development. It was important for me to continuously improve not only my technical skills, but also to go beyond the tasks of a manager, to act as a team leader, and to communicate with the company. In Badoo, this was possible, but only in the following couple of years. So, my next place of work was Lamoda, one of the largest online clothing and footwear stores in Russia and the CIS. I initially came there as a team leader with a task to build from scratch an automation system for the entire delivery service of the company. What challenges did you address at Lamoda? There, I managed a project with the goal of automating a delivery service. I communicated a lot with the company to understand the current demand. Then, I assembled a team from scratch, designed the future system, and put it into operation in a few months. We needed to launch delivery in all the cities of Lamoda’s presence and achieve uninterrupted operation there. The system had to be able to cope with a high load and work efficiently offline—in the case of the typical communication outages in small towns. One day of downtime cost the company millions. At Lamoda, I gained several important team-leading skills. First, I learned the principles of communicating with businesses in a large corporation. The first three months, when I was collecting requirements, were the most difficult: I had to receive prompt replies from a huge network of managers spread all over the country. Second, for the first time, I got to know Scrum thoroughly and began to apply its methodology in managing the technical team. This yielded results: by the end of the first year, we had become the most productive team in the company. More than that, after launching the delivery automation system, my international career began—I was promoted to the position of Head of Engineering and moved to Vilnius. There, my main task was to build effective communication between two development centers in two countries. In total, there were about 150 engineers: 25 in Vilnius and 125 in Moscow. At first, I wanted to divide the teams by their function, but then I realized that this would not be effective, as it would increase communication problems. So, I decided to divide the teams in such a way that each of them could implement the functionality from start to finish without the help of other teams. This made the teams interchangeable and immersed the specialists deeply in the product. In the end, we achieved a comprehensive, accurate understanding of what we were working on. Productivity increased markedly as each team focused on a specific goal, the achievement of which was under their full control. Having had such a diverse experience, did you not want to start your own project? And so it happened. My former colleagues at Lamoda, Maxim Firsov and Sergey Polissar, suggested that I take part as CTO in creating a restaurant food delivery service similar to the Deliveroo service, which is popular in the UK. At the time, Delivery Club was the leader on the Russian delivery market, but they did not yet have their own couriers. They had only just started testing this format—meals were delivered by restaurant couriers. So, our startup Foodfox was not their direct competitor, as we worked with small restaurants which had neither delivery nor a website. That is why we delivered orders using our own staff of couriers. In two months, we launched the service and started receiving the first orders. I was responsible for interviewing potential candidates for the technical team, as well as for all the technical solutions of the service. In particular, I supervised the studio that was developing the application, thinking up how to implement various functionalities into it. For example, among those functionalities, was the ability to track couriers on…
