About

My name is Radosław Skupnik, I live in Rzeszów, Poland, and I’m a self-taught software engineer.

Yeah, I’m one of those guys who took your damn job and doesn’t even have a degree! :)

Well I do, actually, have one - but it’s in English Philology. Yep, I just gave you a reason to nitpick at any tiny mistake I ever make when it comes to English :)

Not to dwelve into things too deeply - I’ve always been fascinated by programming and I’ve been doing it since I was twelve; but the tides of life swirl in unpredictable ways, so, for various reasons, I could not pursue the degree I actually wanted to pursue. I ended up finishing English Philology, but decided that I really want to be an actual software engineer - so I applied for a job, did fine, and here I am. I’ve made some postgraduate certificate in Software Engineering in the meantime, but meh, ain’t nobody gonna care about that.

When I started, I had fun with Turbo Pascal. I was 12 back then, so my greatest achievement was a RAT application that I used to prank my friend three houses down the road over LAN. Ahh, those were the times…

My main programming language is Java and the reason for that is pure coincidence. Back in ~2005, those pieces of software known as server emulators were popular. You know, when there’s a great MMORPG game out there, but you’re just a kid and have no cash to play that game, but you really, really want to, because massive multiplayer man, it was mind-bending back then! So people came up with server emulators - they basically spoofed the packet traffic between the actual game client and the actual game server and used that to recreate the server (emulate it) and use the actual client to connect to a fake server - and there you have it, a private server. Massively bugged and missing key features, but at least in an achievable price range.

Those were probably somewhat illegal back then? I’m not sure, but as a kid, I had no idea anyway, so I played on a Polish private server of a game called Lineage II - the server was called Allseron.

What does it have to do with Java? Well, the emulator was written in Java - and one shiny day I’ve decided to approach the admin and ask if I can help improve the server. And so it started, I used this great new technology called SVN to version my code, which I thought was pretty rad (I’m so sorry my dear GIT, I did not know you back then). I had no idea about design patterns and I knew like 20% of Java syntax but oh well, I still fixed stuff. And by fix I mean I broke it, then tested it, then broke it a little bit less, tested it, and so on, until it was fixed. Mission accomplished, code commited, acted as a god on the server’s community forum (yeah I kinda was a prick).

Fast-forward till today - I work at a software house, mainly heavy backend stuff for businesses like banking, ecommerce, etc. - pretty boring stuff. Sometimes I get to do some big data and use some AWS or Cassandra or Spark, those are actually quite fun. In my free time I usually dabble in game development and some low-level programming (cause I find it hilarious that not even I, the author of my code, understand how the f does it work).

From less important information, I love reading (and sometimes writing) stories and books, I like cats, nature, walks in the forest and semi-competitive gaming (which basically means I’m one of those pricks you meet at Dota 2 that can’t win anything but act like they’re the boss :) ).