About me
Introduction and bio
My name is Tomasz Nieżurawski but I often use a shorter version of my name - Tomek. I found it easier to pronounce for my coworkers. Although, I’m always impressed by people that can say polish „sz” digram. It may not be easy to say.
I’m a 35 years old front-end developer from Poznań, Poland. My country is very lovely, considered as cheap and very safe. I encourage you to visit Poland. You’ll find something for yourself for sure. We can even grab a beer together if you happen to visit Poznań.
Currently, I work for Phorest Salon Software as a Principal Engineer. Greetings to my Irish friends! Awesome people.
I’m a full-time remote worker. It has been 9 years since I started working remotely and I’m very happy with that decision. I used to work for a variety of companies in my 12 years, full-time career. From startups, through middle size to corporation size companies. I can’t say a bad word about any of them. Now I see how lucky I was to meet these people and work in these organizations. So I worked for:
- Fibaro - on home automation when the company was still a small startup,
- IOKI, acquired by Pearson - education company spotted and then acquired by a giant in the industry,
- Roche - big pharma, where IT Security was a king,
- Brandnew - influencer marketing startup, that eventually ran out of money,
- and now Phorest - beauty and hair industry software maker with ambitious plans.
Before all these, I was working part-time for ~7 years when learning my craft (well, I’m still learning every day). That makes me a bit of a dinosaur that is in the industry for the last 19 years. I think I read my first book about HTML in 2003 but made my first money on it in 2005.
I had a short episode where I worked in heavy industry when programming PLC after graduating from Automation and Robotics. It was cool, but one day, when I saw that you can now round borders and use gradients in CSS3 I realized that this is my path. Silly, right?
Well, I guess that shows true passion. So I closed the doors of Robotics and got back to Computer Science.
Here's my resume if you'd like to see it by any chance.
Field of interests
I don’t want to be a fan-boy of a single technology or framework. Same as most of the front-end devs I have my favorite framework but I understand that you choose a tool for a job. Not the other way. So I used or use different frameworks at the time.
My expertise is around Ember and React currently. I used to work with Angular, VueJS, and CanJS. In general, I’m in a camp saying that you should master Vanilla JS. So I practice it every day. But we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Using a proper framework for a job is a skill itself.
I love CSS. Really! It is somehow quite intuitive for me. It’s a pity that it has such a bad press.
I’m not a designer although I designed this blog and most of the layouts in my side-projects. I don’t feel confident when designing. I prefer coding. Anyway, I think I see a bit more than average Software Engineer, and my thoughts are valuable for designers. Even if, as I said, I’m a noob designer.
Pretty much every aspect of front-end development is interesting to me and it’s hard to pick something you can dedicate to. With two exceptions - generating PDFs from HTML and Emails! The first is not the right tool for the job, and the second is still in 2005 when it comes to technology (but check my post about MJML).
Hustling
Sometimes I feel like I have too many ideas. I’m guilty of trying to fix every world’s (or mine) problem with software…
…that I write.
I have three promising side-projects that are actively developed. Hopefully, they all will start earning money for me.
The hard but also interesting and very gratifying thing about working on side-projects is that I have to wear different hats. There are days when I have to be a marketer, designer, FE-dev, backend dev. and OPS. Where the „manager hat” tries to prioritize everything.
You can find me on IndieHackers.com talking about side-projects. A brief description of them is located on the side-projects page.
When not coding
I love football. Probably playing more than watching. I play two times a week in two different leagues. With friends, we play together for ~13 years in the same team - Szturmowcy which means Stormtroopers. It may, or may not be connected with our accuracy when shooting on the goal ;)
I'm also a dad of two which is more challenging than whatever you'll read on this blog. One day I'll tell you what I have learned from my older son about front-end development.
One message before you go
Better done than perfect