Start here for a quick overview of everything you need to know

Hey there, welcome to my page!

You could end up on this website for a few different reasons, but if you are here just for the tech articles (blog) then you can skip this one ;) However, If you are here because I included the link to this page on my CV this is the best place to learn more about me as a human being and how I ended up in IT.

So, my IT journey started when I was ~14ish. I come from a very, very small village in Poland. In fact, my family house was 1km from the actual village, literally in the middle of the woods. That's why when I got my first PC (it was actually a laptop but soon after that I managed to get a PC too) it was suddenly something completely new and interesting.

For the first 2 or 3 years, I didn't have any internet connection that's why after a few weeks of just playing Solitare and trying to find my artistic side in Windows Paint I started learning how this thing works under the hood. Believe me or not, back then, when I manage to first install Windows all by myself it was a magical moment. It escalated quickly from then. I started learning how hard disks work, what is partitioning, what is the difference between FAT(32) and NTFS, what to do when my Windows don't want to boot, etc.

When I was already comfortable with Windows and had a general understanding of how it works I started looking at Linux. It took me a good few months of reading about it before I attempted installing my first Linux distro. That was another breakthrough in my IT journey. After that, I was already 100% sure that this is what I want to do in my life - be an IT engineer.

Of course, being 16 years old I didn't know exactly what kind of IT engineer I want to be. And that's the best part. Because I didn't know that, I simply started learning everything. A bit of programming and web development (back then it was only HTML and Pascal), a bit of system engineering (meaning I tried to understand the concept of virtual machines and how do you connect to other machines over SSH), a bit of networking and databases. Basically, I touched on a few different areas of IT.

Obviously, that didn't make me an expert in everything, in fact, it didn't make me an expert in anything back then. Remember that we are still talking about me before even finishing high school. However, because I started so young and on my own, by the time my official career started I already knew quite a lot from quite a few areas of IT. I'm really grateful to myself that I was so undecided back then because it really paid off. My whole career was mainly on the infrastructure side but I was able to easily understand developers point of view and I never developed that typical "sys admin bias". Whenever there was an issue I always tried to read the code and understand the problem myself first even when I knew it was an application issue, not infra. And also because of that, I was always looking for workarounds or coding/scripting solutions when a "typical sys admin" would tell "that's a bug in the tool we are using we can't do anything about it, we need to wait for the patch".

Now, after over 10 years in IT I am still learning and I still have that "wide spectrum of interests". I consider myself 60% Systems Engineer (that includes Network Engineering, Platform Engineering and nowadays Cloud Native Engineering), 30% Developer (by now I know Python, JavaScript and Ruby quite well, I am learning Go right now but I am also familiar with Full Stack development, I build my own startup www.rentheview.com in Ruby on Rails all by myself, but I'm also not a stranger to Node.js, Vue.js and few other JS frameworks) and 10% a Leader. On top of that, if I have some free time to spare I like playing with many other areas of IT like Machine Learning, IoT or Blockchain.

As you may also guess from the image of this post, I like to share my knowledge. I speak at conferences and meetups, I try to organize often internal demos and mini learning sessions, I write articles here and on medium.com and I contribute to open-source.