About
Welcome to rusin.work, a technical blog for curious people.
I’m Piotr and I’ll be your host here. I’m a software engineer, husband, and soon-to-be dad, living in the small city of Pszczyna in Poland.
To start out, let me tell you about my programming past so we can get to know each other better.
My parents bought us a working computer when I was about 12. That computer got me hooked into early internet, gaming, and through it, into programming. I gamed a lot back then, and one of the games I stumbled upon in supermarket was called Colobot. It was a post-apocalyptic game developed by the Swiss studio Epsitec SA about an astronaut that has to fight ants, mine, build structures and weaponry. It had one particularly interesting aspect. It allowed you to program robots to do mining or fighting for you using a custom-built programming language called CBOT that resembled C++ and Java. That was my first taste of writing simple programs. It was fun to see the results.
I wrote my first “real” computer program in middle school using Turbo Pascal on a rusty computer that my school had won on a TV show back in the 90s. It had been used since then to teach basics of programming. I was fortunate enough to attend those lessons. That program was just a plain print statement, but something changed in me back then, a new, fascinating world opened up I could influence and interact with.
That spark followed me to choose a technical high school, where over the four years I learned more about IT, operating systems, and programming in general. For the last decade since then, I’ve been a backend developer. The majority of the work I did was related to PHP and its ecosystem. I worked my way up from WordPress and Magento frameworks to the challenges with Symfony. The latter helped me to dive deeper into software architecture and system design. I’ve met amazing people, but the initial spark started to fade. Work got repetitive and I started to burn out. Soon enough, all of that was about to change.
The Layoff Copy link to this section
In October 2024, the company I worked at did a mass layoff. Half of the workforce was let off, along with me. With a 3 month notice period, I faced a choice. I could either look for a new job in PHP (a safe bet), or try something that interested me for some time, but was risky: pivot and start working with Go. I’ve decided to give that pivot a chance.
I spent three months preparing and job applying. By March 2025, I went through successful interview loop and got an offer from Remitly. I’ve been involved with Go, Java, and since recently, in TypeScript and React Native. 1
Following my interests in Go, I stumbled on ThePrimeagen content on YouTube. Prime in turn, got me interested in neovim. Pretty soon I also transitioned from Ubuntu to Arch + Hyprland. Then I went deeper into the rabbit hole. I transitioned from Arch to NixOS for my operating system and home infrastructure. Tinkering and setting up everything from scratch on my own is so fun! Throughout this process I realized how much joy learning and experimenting brings me.
This blog builds on that joy, to study how computers and software running on them work. I’m here to dive deeper into both, sharing what I learned along the way.
Sincerely,
Piotr Rusin
P.S. I’d really like to know who you are and what brings you here. What is your current role, what are you interested in, and what challenges are you facing right now? Reach me at [email protected] and let’s talk :-)