The Story

My first name is Krzysztof, and my surname is Krzys. Yes, Krzys — essentially the shortened version of Krzysztof. You could say that from the very beginning, I was raised in a culture of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) and avoiding redundancy. To make matters worse, for anyone who isn't Polish, it represents an insurmountable linguistic barrier. The nickname "Guttenbergovitz" was born one beer-fueled evening at the Cart & Horses in London (the legendary cradle of Iron Maiden). A friend tried to introduce me to a local; my Eastern European accent collided with a long argument we'd been having about the origins of typography, and out came this Habsburg-meets-Gutenberg monstrosity. It stuck, and eventually became my digital handle.

My journey into software started in a concrete block apartment in Poland, typing BASIC commands into a ZX Spectrum. Then came Atari (my apologies to the Commodore crowd). Back then, it wasn't about the technology itself — it was about the raw magic of making things appear out of thin air. After a formal education in math and physics, I took a sharp turn into the humanities. That detour taught me a truth I keep rediscovering: most hard technical problems are actually people problems in disguise. Code is just the execution layer.

Over the last twenty years, I've done it all. I spent years wrestling with DTP, database administration in ad agencies, and building PHP e-commerce systems in London. Then came the cloud, Terraform, and distributed systems at Norweb. Today, as a Software Engineer at Josera, I do a bit of everything: from SRE and architecture to mentoring the team and training pokemons... I mean, LLMs. Working for a food production company (rather than a software house or digital agency) is a healthy reality check. It confronts agency-style hype with the tangible world where engineering actually connects with a physical product. It's the other side of the barricade – and a very welcome shift in perspective.

I've learned to value simplicity above everything else. I've seen too many systems collapse under the weight of resume-driven development and conference trends. These days, I keep my solutions simple, my observability tight, and my cynicism healthy.