About me

I hesitated for a long time over what to put here. I really dislike talking about myself, but I also recognize that context is sometimes helpful.

Let me start with why I decided to make this blog. Truth be told, I don’t have an innate need to write or share my thoughts. In fact, I’d rather not go through all this effort. I prefer to listen and think to myself. But then again, people who are loud and scream from the rooftops don’t always have interesting things to say.

At the same time, I’ve talked to plenty of insightful people who never share their thoughts because they don’t like self-promotion or just don’t think such sharing adds value. But how can we ever know which of our thoughts are the ones that add value?

In recent years, the amount of genuine, thoughtful content on the internet has gotten completely swamped by machine-generated slop at scale, optimized for traffic and “engagement” (however that is measured). I don’t like it. I want to read what other smart humans have to say, so that it sparks my own unique thoughts. I love thinking new things. I believe there are more people who feel the same.

If there’s a chance that something I write causes someone else to have new thoughts, I should take it. Worst case, I’m creating something that’s on par with slop, but at least it’s going to be unique and human.

This should already tell you something about me.

Now onto things that people usually want to know. I’m originally from Poland, dropped out of my Civil Engineering studies to come work in Switzerland (I did eventually get a degree in Finance, mostly for the sake of having the paper and not giving people any more reasons to pay me less than my male colleagues). I’ve lived in Switzerland my whole adult life and feel generally more Swiss than Polish, as much as I could ever claim any belonging of this sort.

I’ve worked in tech, or as we say over here, in IT, for the past two decades. I learn quickly and get bored once I know something too well, so ended up switching roles throughout my career, which tends to be very confusing for most people, especially for recruiters. To simplify, things I’ve spent most time doing were: testing, programming, UX, DevOps, product management, engineering leadership, and for the past several years, managing the whole business. I've heard before that talking about my varied experience detracts from my “executive presence” but I believe on the contrary, it enriches it.

While my roles may have changed, there are some constant themes. How do things work, how do you make stuff happen, how do you know if things are working as well as they could, how can you make things even better? I guess it’s all systems thinking. These are the things I tend to write about, no matter which domain. If the set of articles you see here seems like a bunch of unrelated, random topics, now you know why.

You will likely see a lot of leadership related topics, because most of my perspective on getting things done comes from leading through influence, managing managers or leaders of leaders. Since I’m running a company (Authress is our core product), I have a lot of thoughts on business in general, and running tech business in particular. You may see some security topics, because that’s what my team at Authress needs to pay attention to, and there are some… curious idiosyncrasies in this domain. Same goes for DevOps. I occasionally have things to say about software architecture, mostly because it intersects with teams’ ability to deliver within the parameters of the business, and I’m super passionate about that.

I don’t write for bots or algorithms. This isn’t LinkedIn. I don’t optimize for traffic, in fact, I don’t use any sort of analytics here (did you notice the lack of that awful cookie banner?) If you like what you read here, the best thing you can do is to share the link with others. If you disagree so strongly that you feel the urge to write something yourself, please do so (I’d be happy if you shared a link with me!).

Ok, this is way too much text for what you probably expected to find on this page. Thank you for getting to the end (and if you just skipped all the way here, congrats, you got to the end faster!) Have a look around and make yourself at home.