It was a sunny, hot day in Sydney. At that time, I was living in Bondi Beach, next to one of the most iconic Aussie beaches. By the late afternoon, I got home, grabbed my board and walked towards the ocean for my daily dose of surfing. Since Bondi was usually overcrowded I h…
That was a beautiful morning. As usual, I woke up early, ate my small breaky and headed to the ocean to catch a few waves before my whole world woke up. Drove down to the beach, changed into my wetsuit, grabbed the board and ran to the shore to see what Mother Nature had to offer today….
Sometimes I go for a surf with my head full of thoughts. I think about the stuff at work, I try to solve some coding puzzles, I try to figure out why my wife cannot understand my point of view, or I bring day-to-day anxiety to the water. Long story short, it never help…
I would call myself a self-taught surfer. I’ve been learning how to ride the waves for a long time now, with a few professional lessons at the beginning. Unfortunately, because I was going through it without detailed guidance, I encountered some pitfalls along the way and develop…
Years ago, while I was at the University, I never thought about leaving my home country. I didn’t speak any foreign language well enough to communicate without issues, and I wasn’t interested in travelling just for the sake of doing it. I stayed happily in the bubb…
They say that once you understand the Monads, first, you lose the ability to explain it, and second, you write a blog post about it. Even though I’ve been grasping the concept for a few years already, I haven’t honestly grasped it yet, but I thought I would share the …
Finally, we are heading back to Australia. With all my family, we are excited to be back in Down Under and get our lives back on track. I can’t wait to hit the water in the early morning. My wife misses her friends, and my daughter is about to return to childcare and water-cen…
I finally had a chance to dive into the deepest pool in Europe. At DeepSpot near Warsaw, you can dive up to 45m, which is way beyond my current freediving capabilities. So, I signed up for a Level 2 course, which allows me to dive as deep as 30m. The study lasted three days, during whic…
I began my journey in functional programming a while ago. For a couple of years, I’ve had numerous aha moments, discovering new concepts that have drastically changed my way of thinking and looking at code.
First, I realised the power of immutability and the importance of stat…
When I was a kid, everything seemed far away. In my head, Europe looked like an endless place that was pretty much my whole world. Poland, the country where I’m from, marked the boundaries of my cognition and crossing it even for a second felt like an adventure. America was a differe…
I’ve been writing a post regularly for a while. Every second Sunday, no matter what was happening, I found some time to sit, reflect, and write down something that was on my mind. I always believed it is a great way to keep in touch through written form of expression, practice my Engl…
That was a sunny morning at Manly. With my mate, we jumped into the water and tried to make the most out of the minor conditions. I caught a few waves on my shortboard, but most of them were very quick with one clumsy turn. My friend’s board was a Malibu, whic…
It was a late May afternoon at Maroubra. As winter was about to arrive, the days became shorter and shorter, so the sun was nearly setting. In early 2017, I was still a BJJ white belt and was about to start my Australian journey with this sport. That evening, I attended my first …
That was a rainy Thursday afternoon. After a great surf session, I headed to pick up my wetsuit from repair. I broke the zipper, and instead of throwing it away, I decided to get it repaired. The other reason was that I was too cheap to buy a new one, but I pr…
That was an excellent piece of code. The solution was concise, composable, highly cohesive, loosely coupled, and open for extension. I couldn’t stop looking at the beauty that came out of my fingertips. All the functional programming knowledge I recently read about was applied …
It was a cold morning. I set the alarm for 6 am to wake up for the surf. The sun was about to rise, but it was still dark outside. When I heard the alarm going off, I hoped it wasn’t mine, it was 5 am, and I had one more hour of sleep. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the case. I had to stan…
You might relate to the situation when you walk in front of somebody, crossing paths, and neither of you knows the other’s intentions. You get closer, and you try to turn left to avoid bumping into a person. Unfortunately, at the same time, they turn right, so in respon…
In the book that I’m reading, Jimmy Carr mentions the importance of feedback and how comedians use it to improve their game. He points out that when he stands on the stage, the performer knows straight away if the joke works or not, and he both can and should take action on it. The …
Not long ago, I wrote a beautiful piece of code. I was very proud of how decoupled it was, how flexible and reactive. I iterated over it a few times while testing the solution in the wild and incorporating reviews from my peers. It felt perfect to have all tested ideally. Everything…
We all have our preferences. Even though I doubt that we are born as early birds or night owls, we can definitely be classified as one or the other. As a side note, I believe that our habits make preferences rather than the other way around, but this is not what I want to co…
It is in human nature to avoid work. Even though I consider myself hardworking, I often find it challenging to start tedious, repetitive tasks such as refactoring code, exercising, stretching, or even cleaning my apartment. It is common knowledge that we build big things …
Not long ago, I had an exciting conversation that led to a deeper understanding of how we learn and get frustrated with the lack of progress. It got me thinking later about my approach to gaining new knowledge and my current, ongoing projects.
Firstly, a significant obstacle is the…
I have an interesting story to share that happened to me a few days ago. Like every day, I woke up in the morning, and after some morning routines, I went for a surf. On the way, next to the lift, my neighbour came to me and told me off about something. He had a point, but it felt weir…
I’ve recently heard one of the executives in my current company explaining his approach to career development. I was pleasantly surprised to hear him draw a comparison to surfing. He said that it is sometimes worth just sitting on the shore, looking at the oc…
I often feel thrilled to jump into the water and catch whatever comes in my direction. I grab the board, roughly look where the breaks are, where the rips are, and within a minute or two, I’m at the break looking for the opportunity to have a wave of the day. A set c…
Often, I face a lack of motivation in my life. Everything seems to lack profound meaning, and even though I enjoy the activities, they don’t make sense when viewed from a higher perspective. This type of thinking applies to everything I’m not forced to do, such as surfing or jiuj…
I often wondered what could be causing stagnation. Usually, I explain it by a lack of motivation, self-confidence and action. That might be correct, but all of this is also coming from somewhere. Of course, we can blame the environment and lack of opportunities, but as is …
The ocean carries a tremendous amount of energy that travels hundreds or even thousands of miles and can offer you a great ride and a lot of fun while surfing if you only use it in the right way. Of course, the first thing is to be in the right moment at the right time, …
I was writing a simple app to present a surf forecast for my local spot some time ago. I began by introducing the swell size, wind speed and direction, and all relevant data from the MSW API that I believe is crucial for predicting whether the surf will be good or not. T…
Surfing is a complex sport. However, it seems simple, from a high level, you catch a wave, get some speed, use the wave face to do some maneuvers, and finally finish the ride with a big splash. In reality, it is far more complicated and depends on multiple factors th…
Recently, I’ve been trying to work on my surfing a bit more consciously by looking into the fundamental elements of the sport. By better understanding the basic concepts, I try to develop patterns that will become ingrained in my muscle memory and subconscious thinkin…
This week, I want to write something a bit more specific than I usually do. For a few weeks, I’ve been actively working on my surfing pop-ups. Through searching resources, exercising, and practising, I’ve come to some interesting conclusions, at least for me.
First of all, why …
Since childhood, I was addicted to two things: water and adrenaline. Because I was born far away from the ocean coast, I couldn’t experience the beautiful life around the water as much as I would desire. I was a natural swimmer though, learning how to behave in the liquid mediu…
“Do not reinvent the wheel” is a piece of advice I’ve heard many times and have even mentioned on occasion. Although rewriting something in your own words (code) is sometimes vital for the learning process, it is usually not efficient to implement things that people have…
In today’s writing, I will start with a little story. Around a month ago, I bought a fish tank and a little goldfish for my daughter’s second birthday. I am taking care of the fish, and I am responsible for its survival by changing the water, setting up the filters, feeding, and pe…
After reading “Lean Startup” and hearing all the stories about experimentation and iterations, I thought about my workflow. Although I see that I apply it in many cases, I have identified a few areas for improvement.
Firstly, I’ll try to explain the idea of small batch…
I’ve understood the benefits of continuous deployment for a long time, but I couldn’t figure out how it could work in real life. Having very short release cycles with everything being pushed straight to production with automated verification and feature toggling seemed ma…
Today I would like to share some of my thoughts about a book that I have recently read. The title is “Zero to One” and it was written by Peter Thiel. It is a very interesting position because it talks about building a big company from a successful entrepreneur a…
Today, I would like to discuss career development briefly. For the last half a year, I’ve been working at Seek, the largest job aggregator in the ANZ region. Getting deeper into the domain and working closely with people concerned about the topic of personal growth in the profession…
Recently, while getting to know more about Stoic philosophy and playing with cognitive-behavioural therapy, I concluded that being present in the current moment is a crucial part of being productive and, in a broader sense, of life satisfaction. Being present means focusing on w…
A few years ago, I inherited a reasonably simple system based on Node.js that had many basic functionalities, such as authentication and database connection baked in. Since I had much bigger problems to solve at that point, and everything seemed to be working just fine, I ignored thos…
Very recently, I finished reading a fantastic book that gathers some letters written almost two thousand years ago by Seneca. This is a great lecture that helped me dig a bit deeper into Stoic philosophy. The way of life explained by Seneca and the description of a wise man ar…
During my whole career, I underestimated the importance of logs. I was always aware of the importance of logging key events to track and solve issues, but I never paid enough attention. In the mobile world, we tend not to log much. We prefer to use analytics to track key met…
I was wondering what to write about this week. Since I haven’t been writing much technical content recently, I wanted to revisit this area, but I prefer to prepare thoroughly before writing something from scratch. So before I dive back into the tech world, I’ll write a bit about …
Last week I wasn’t doing much, so theoretically I shouldn’t have much to write. Fortunately, doing nothing is also a choice that could be analysed and reasoned about. Today, I’m writing about my struggles with motivation and how I cope with it in the short and long run.
For…
I’ve been interested in Stoic philosophy for a while. This way of thinking seems in line with my personal life view. Having just finished reading Meditations from Marcus Aurelius, I would like to jot down some of my thoughts.
I found it very interesting how Marcus Aure…
At any point in my life, I’ve often felt like I had too much to do and not enough time to complete it. Feeling overwhelmed, I tried to push things, hoping to have more time once I’m “done”. Unfortunately, whenever I’m done with one thing, something else takes its place, and history rep…
Recently, at work, I encountered an issue while updating a feature to a new UI. It coincided with the data model change, resulting in a change across the stack. The first thought was that it would be easier to start over, leaving the old world untouched, and just fo…
Recently, I came across an Eric Evans lecture about Domain-Driven Design. I find this topic extremely interesting.
In this talk, among the other topics, he discussed what the model should be. The idea is that the model we create doesn’t need to be highly detailed or realistic…
Since I haven’t written anything for two weeks, I think it is time to put some thoughts on paper, even though I don’t have anything particular to write about. There is one thing that comes to mind, and it seems relevant to coding.
Recently, I’ve become interested in p…
This week, for the first time in my life, I was about to try freediving. It consumed most of my mental energy outside of my day job, and I think I have some interesting takeaways, apart from the actual physical act of diving.
Freediving is more than just submerging underwat…
Some time ago, I had a pretty cool conversation with my mate on the mat about different approaches to train jiu-jitsu. You can either make a plan and complete it piece by piece, adding new techniques to become a complete fighter who knows all about the art of BJJ, or you can go wi…
This is about to be the first story in this small blog. I’ve been thinking about publishing some stuff for a while, but I never had enough time or motivation to start doing it. But the easiest way to start something is not to wait, but to go with the flow and push it out. That…
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