Now

Day job

Software engineer at Josera / Erbacher Food Family. The company operates across three divisions: Petfood (premium nutrition for dogs, cats, and horses), Agrar (livestock feed and agricultural solutions) and Food Intelligence (B2B ingredients for the human food industry). Not a software house — a company that makes physical products, ships them in trucks, and deals with actual supply chains. In practice "software engineer" means wearing every hat as needed: SRE, architect, platform engineering, security, devops. Being close to real production instead of purely imagined digital worlds is a certain kind of antidote to the tech-trends bubble. Has the dynamics of a startup with all the pros and cons that implies. Plenty to complain about, but not boredom and not lack of interesting challenges. Which suits me.

WebPlumber

A side project with a group of friends, somewhat against the current. The founding observation: three-quarters of the web can be stabilized without reaching for solutions from magazine front pages — solutions designed for medium/large corporations with very specific scale requirements that most projects will never hit. We patch leaking databases, bump versions, write tests where risk actually lives. Incremental modernization over rewrites.

→ webplumber.pl

Ravner

A reconnaissance system I'm building to scratch a specific itch. The pain: existing recon tooling is either a collection of disconnected scripts requiring manual orchestration, or enterprise behemoths that cost more than the targets are worth. Ravner combines shallow surface scans (Project Discovery tooling, written in Go) with Elixir as the orchestrator. Why Elixir? Because BEAM handles concurrency and fault tolerance in a way that makes three-quarters of a typical infrastructure stack evaporate. No message queues. No separate job runners. No container orchestration for simple scaling. The VM just... handles it. Dangerously eyeing Gleam while I'm at it.

→ github.com/guttenbergovitz/ravner

The rabbit holes

Currently wandering through architecture, cloud, governance, cybersecurity, and networking. The kind of territory where abstractions eventually leak and someone needs to understand what actually happens underneath. Hence the Linux obsession. Hence the pain stack. Not an expert in any of these — just someone who keeps pulling threads until the sweater unravels.

Languages

Go is my bread and butter — deeply embedded, genuinely loved. But Rust has become something like a compass. It teaches humility the way a keisaku stick does in Zen practice: sharp, immediate, impossible to argue with. So I'll shut up and keep wrestling with Tokio and lifetimes. Elixir is my new infatuation — fell hard for the Erlang philosophy. Market and reason both say no. That rarely stops me.

Current stack

Paradoxically digging into fundamentals — the longer you work, the more you realize how much the foundations matter.

• Nemeth's Unix and Linux System AdministrationThe sysadmin bible, 5th edition. Because even if you'll never manage bare metal servers, understanding how the OS actually works changes how you think about everything built on top.
• Kleppmann's Designing Data-Intensive ApplicationsThe best technical book written in the last decade. Period. Every chapter is a masterclass in clear thinking about distributed systems.
• Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic StyleCan't help it. The typography bible, again. It's not about fonts — it's about rhythm, proportion, and respect for the reader.
• Mary Beard's SPQRBecause Rome explains everything about how organizations, politics, and power actually work. More relevant to corporate life than any business book.

Medium

Two decades of code wrestling, humbled daily by impostor syndrome. Loose reflections on the LLM-ization of our industry, Stoic frameworks for technical debt, and whatever rabbit hole I'm currently lost in. Less "how to prompt" tutorials, more "what does this mean for us as a profession" territory. Some of it now runs under the Web Plumber banner.

• The Panther in the Mud: Why Winning Every Benchmark Is How You Lose the WarA few hundred impeccably polite goroutines wage an accidental war of attrition against a database. The most recent piece, written under the Web Plumber banner.
• Elixir & We've Been There Before (Or: The Aqueduct Had Running Water All Along)A forty-year-old answer to modern concurrency — the philosophy behind Ravner's orchestrator, written down.
• I Am No Longer a Programmer — and I Tried, Briefly, to Feel Bad About ItThe LLM-ization essay in its purest form — why the correct response is neither grief nor panic.

The full archive lives on the writing page — or directly on Medium.

German

Initially because it resists — a language that forces you to think in structure. Then "Adieu" by 17 Hippies happened — Berlin melancholy in waltz time — and suddenly German wasn't just solid, it was beautiful. Marlene Dietrich sealed it. The language has unfairly bad PR. The fact that I work for a German company is correlation, not causation.

Music

A 1,000+ track playlist called "...stoic..." that defies genre classification. Industrial meets cabaret meets whatever mood hits at 2am. The through-line is probably intensity and a certain gravity — music that takes itself seriously without apology.

→ Spotify: ...stoic...

The pain stack

Everyone deserves their midlife crisis. Mine manifests as: Arch, i3, tmux/zellij, vim/helix, podman, nix, and because things weren't complicated enough, nu shell. Paradoxically comfortable. Rust learning continues in the background — treating it as kata that helps me understand what I used to conveniently ignore about memory and ownership.

Philosophy & spirituality

A combination of Stoicism — which I've gotten into quite deeply, though it's hard to admit these days, when broicism is riding the wave; mine is the "despite" kind, not a life-hacking tool — and Zen, caught on first contact with the work of Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki. After that it rolled downhill on its own.

Body maintenance

Experimenting with paleo. Two years of consistent gym, recently branching into calisthenics — because when you spend that much time sitting at a computer, eventually you have to. Acquired kettlebells. Own a TRX that I optimistically believe I'll eventually use correctly.

Cooking

Japanese obsession deepening — not because it's fashionable, but out of respect for the piety the Japanese bring to it: the same cut repeated a thousand times until it becomes prayer. Sushi and sashimi — competent. Udon — decent. Ramen — grounds for ritual suicide. Working on it.