About

I'm a Polish software engineer who builds furniture.

For 15+ years I shipped code — two CTO stints, two exits, more contracts than I can count. I don't write code anymore. AI does. I haven't manually written a line in six weeks. My PRs look great. The KPIs look great. The bottleneck moved up — it's not execution now, it's deciding what's worth building.

Meanwhile, in my garage workshop in a village 40 km from Warsaw, I spend evenings cutting solid oak. The wood grew for 80 years and dried for three before I touched it. I sell the pieces under Berserker Oak, with the tagline "For a change — real." I'm not the best carpenter in Poland. I might be the worst carpenter with the best website. Both statements are true.

The essays here live between those two facts.

I write about AI, identity, craft, time, and what doesn't compress. About what an engineer becomes when the machine codes better than him. About why the cropper in 1812 smashing the shearing-frame and the engineer in 2026 writing think-pieces about AI are doing the same psychological thing. About Innis, McLuhan, Camus, Lem, and what woodworking teaches that no API documentation can.

I've been on Medium since 2018. Wrote tutorials for a while — one hit 60k views in 2022 and made the Level Up Coding front page. Then I stopped, because the questions changed. I came back to write something else.

I'm not a doomer. I'm not selling a course. I have a workshop, three daughters, a Honda Rebel with 11k km on it, and a cap that says Make Orwell Fiction Again.

If any of that interests you, stick around.

📌 Absurdist with a workshop. I build systems, furniture, and sentences.

---

Elsewhere on the internet:

Essays in Polish: opalczynski.pl

The furniture: berserkeroak.com

Fractional CTO work: the-one.dev

Poetry (Started again after a 25-year break): theashesofphoenix.com