About me

A bit of biography

My IT adventure started at the age of 10, when I got my first computer. Unlike my peers, I was not interested in games but in what the machine could do – and that is how I caught the programming bug. The revolution came around 1996, when Linux (Debian) arrived on my hard drive. It gave me everything I needed, for free. In 1998 I joined the Beskid Linux Users Group and almost simultaneously co-founded Cityhood with friends – a startup building the tourist portal multitravel.info and the local portal bielsko.com.pl, including hand-crafted maps (in the days before Google Maps existed).

In 2000, alongside studies at the Lodz University of Technology (Bielsko-Biala branch, from 2001 the University of Technology and Humanities), I started my first full-time job at Hyperion as lead network administrator for an ISP. In 2003 I took a year's break and joined the army as a volunteer. I dropped out of university – there was no way to balance everything at once.

After the army I worked at Telebonus (introducing VoIP and Asterisk, C and Python) and AJC (ISP network administration, C development), before landing in Cork, Ireland in 2006, at Slacht Ltd. For almost two years we developed a dedicated Mandriva-based Linux distribution with a built-in Asterisk PBX, a speech recognition system and other telephony software.

Back in Poland I joined Mainseek in Bielsko-Biala, where for over three years I developed dedicated HTTP/FTP servers, Qt client applications, image feature extraction, media conversion and data parsers. In 2011 I opened my own business – SoftStudio – offering software development, IT services and sound engineering. A notable project was AliorSync (virtual bank branch): technology selection, a video-chat applet in ActionScript/Flash, and a real-time RTMP-to-SIP proxy server written in Python.

Between 2014 and 2018 I worked at APM PRO developing software for intelligent transport systems: WIM (weigh-in-motion) scales, VMS (variable message signs), ANPR, red-light detection and road weather systems. I then moved into Samsung's 5G Core project via Sii Poland, before joining Samsung Electronics directly in December 2019 as Principal Solutions Architect. For over two years I worked on 5G RAN signalling, 5G CORE data exchange architecture (SBI), Network Exposure Function and Common API Framework.

Since May 2022 I have been working as Solutions Architect at Cobham Satcom in Krakow, designing on-shore systems for coordinating and monitoring maritime satellite communications. My work sits at the intersection of voice and data communications, with a current focus on Push-to-Talk (PTT) systems for mission-critical and commercial applications.

What I do

"Impossible things we do straight away, miracles take a little longer"

When asked "In what language or technology do you develop software?" I answer with another question: "In whatever is needed." – tools should fit the problem, not the other way around. My experience is broad enough that learning a new language takes me at most a week. Languages I feel most confident in:

  • C/C++
  • Python
  • Java / Java EE
  • C#
  • ActionScript
  • PHP

Favourite frameworks: GLib (C), Poco (C++), Twisted (Python). Databases: PostgreSQL (favourite), MySQL, MongoDB. Areas of expertise: software architecture, VoIP and telecommunications (Asterisk, SIP, RTP), satellite networks, PTT, 5G Core/RAN, DSP, speech synthesis and recognition, ITS, server-side and backend systems.

And the music plays

Lest anyone think my entire world revolves solely around computers – I have another passion: music. My compositional skills are pretty much non-existent and my performance skills firmly amateur, but I feel quite at home with sound production, editing, mastering and remastering. What do I listen to most often? Anything that does not irritate me and is not too primitive. And what do I like best? Jazz, without a doubt.