I build engineering organizations, and the leaders who run them.

Where I'm useful

• You need to know what you're buying.

  I've assessed engineering organizations to support acquisition and investment decisions, against criteria covering both software and product development.

  Assessmentsto support acquisition, investment and architecture decisions

• Your engineering organization is growing faster than its structure.

  As CTO I took a technology organization from 60 to 200 people without lowering the hiring bar: clear structure, leadership at every level, and a culture where people learn from each other and knowledge doesn't sit with one person.

  60 → 200people, as CTO and later Vice President

• Your best engineers need to become leaders.

  I helped twenty engineers grow into team leads, architects and chapter leads. Before that I built a school that turned students into developers.

  20 leadersgrown from individual contributors

• Two companies had to build one product together.

  For seven years I led a strategic partnership between a software company and its largest client, aligning both sides on strategy, architecture and culture.

  7 yearsof partnership between RST and Trans.eu

If one of these sounds like your situation, I'd be glad to talk it through.

Experience

1. Area Leader, Platform Development · Trans.eu Group

   2025 – now

   Major European logistics platform for carriers and freight forwarders.

   • Lead the core platform division: 45 people in 10 teams, each with its own team leader. There's no engineering manager or product manager in the line, so I own the backlog, priorities, team composition and compensation.
   • The company-wide architecture group sits in my division.
   • Platform backbone: authentication, API and gateways, messaging, testing, core services, and AI-only projects.

2. CTO and Vice President · RST Software Masters

   2013 – 2025

   Software company supplying engineering teams and architects to product companies. I joined as an architect and led the developer chapter before becoming CTO, and later also Vice President.

   • CTO, and later Vice President, while the company grew from 60 to 200 people.
   • Built and ran a delivery organization of 80–100 people in 15 teams, led by 10 architects and responsible for 80 microservices.
   • Moved a live messaging platform from a proprietary C++ server to ejabberd. It handles 350 messages and 13,000 presence events per second.

3. Software Developer, then Software Architect · Nasza Klasa

   2010 – 2013

   Poland's largest social network at the time.

   • Designed the achievements system for a 15-million-user platform. It took 2,500 calls a second with negligible performance impact.

4. Software Developer · Gadu-Gadu and earlier roles

   2006 – 2010

   Gadu-Gadu was Poland's dominant instant messenger.

Writing and speaking

Memoirs of a Software Team Leader

The book I wanted to read when I became a team leader. Self-published in 2013, it was featured on the Leanpub homepage.

See the book on Leanpub →

New writing

I write about engineering organizations for the people who run companies: what to look for, what breaks, and what it costs.

Follow on LinkedIn →

Talks and workshops

• From frustration to fascination: cutting report generation from 14 hours to 5 minutesSnowflake Data for Breakfast, Warsaw · 2024
• How to write valuable unit testsTalk at Boiling Frogs; workshops at 4Developers, PHPers Summit and phpCE · 2017Watch the talk →
• Do you need a software team leader?4Developers · 2014
• Performance measuringinfoMEET, BIT Fest and PHPers · 2014

From the archive

Before I ran engineering organizations, I wrote about building software. These articles from 2008–2015 still get read.

• Do You Need a Software Team Leader?2014
• Unit Tests — Love, Ignorance and Getting Real2010
• Application Architecture vs The Web2012
• NoSQL Solutions – When to Use Them?2014
• tmux Tutorial — Split Terminal Windows Easily2012 · most read
• Math Parser, a four-part series2008