Dmitry Derbenev

Biographie

Living proof that charisma can sometimes genuinely replace documentation. He usually says, “it’s a five-minute fix, ” after which the whole team either gets a new feature or a brand-new reason not to touch production. He appears precisely at the moment when everyone has already decided that something is better left alone, opens so many tabs and terminals that they collectively start questioning the meaning of life, commits something, and disappears — leaving behind a working result and a fresh set of questions about reality. He thrives in chaos, loves flashy solutions, and can keep a perfectly serious face when everything is held together entirely by enthusiasm. His special superpower is spotting future problems the way ordinary people notice notifications: if Dmitry ever says, “this will blow up later, ” the team can relax — because it absolutely will. Inside the team, he is best known for the phrase, “I don’t know why it works, but we can still tweak it, ” and for his unique method of making “small changes” — the kind after which, a couple of weeks later, the project is unrecognizable, two more side projects have appeared, and the backlog contains ten new questions that were never there before.